Image by Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a registry tracking Americans with autism as part of a series of new studies by America's anti-vax health czar, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, to discover the "cause" of the condition.As CBS News reports, NIH director and COVID truther Jay Bhattacharya told councillors that the studies, and the so-called "disease" registry that will be integrated into them, will glean data from a wide range of sources including pharmacies, Veterans Affairs, private insurance companies, and — perhaps most invasively — data from smart watches and fitness trackers.As of now, it's unclear how this data is being pulled, if people will be able to opt out, or if anyone will be informed when their data is used for these studies. We've reached out to the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ask about all of the above.Launched under the guise of streamlining healthcare information, this announcement comes just a week after Kennedy declared in an alarming and inaccurate speech that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will, under his leadership, embark on a quest to discover the "cause" of autism, which he has referred to as both a "preventable disease" and an "epidemic."The allegedly brainwormed political scion added that children who live with autism will "never pay taxes" or "hold a job" — inaccurate statements that raised the hackles of autism advocates who called that rhetoric eugenicist.As if all that weren't ominous enough, the newly-announced studies will also involve up to 20 groups of outside researchers, which suggests they too will have access to all that sensitive health data — including that of minors. In our questions to NIH and HHS, we also asked about how that data will be stored and safeguarded.Initially, RFK Jr. vowed to have discovered the cause of autism by September — but Bhattacharya was forced to walk back that outrageous timeline after acknowledging that even the fastest government grants process will drag his boss' bunk research out until at least year's end."We're going to get hopefully grants out the door by the end of the summer, and people will get to work," the NIH director told reporters earlier this week. "We'll have a major conference, with updates, within the next year."Bhattacharya also tempered Kennedy's claims that there will be a silver bullet "cause" of autism discovered by his still-unannounced outside "experts" — though he appeared to trip over his words a bit while doing so."It's hard to guarantee when science will make an advance," he said during the same press conference. "It depends on, you know... nature has its say."Though Kennedy has had to do his own rhetorical walkback in the face of a massive and deadly measles outbreak, there's a very good chance that the "environmental toxins" referenced in his recent speech are nothing more than vaccines — which, despite being long demonstrated not to cause autism, remain a pet target for the HHS secretary.Is the man in charge of America's health compiling an autism database to use people's health records to prove the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism? Only time will tell — but there's plenty of reason to believe he will.Share This Article