U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is currently pursuing an unprecedented level of access to the medical records of everyday Americans. His stated goal? To investigate potential links between vaccines, autism, and chronic diseases.
While the medical establishment has studied and flatly rejected the vaccine-autism connection for decades, the HHS is aggressively seeking data from state-level medical databases. This move is raising massive privacy, legal, and ethical questions among public health leaders.
Here is a breakdown of what the HHS is attempting to do, how states are reacting, and what it could mean for your personal health information.
The Push for Your Private Data
Behind the scenes, the HHS has been requesting access to state “health information exchanges” (HIEs). These are little-known but powerful networks that allow hospitals, clinics, and health systems to share detailed, identifiable patient information with one another. Normally, these systems are used to help an ER doctor quickly pull up your medical history or to alert health departments about infectious disease outbreaks like measles.
Kennedy and his advisers, however, want to use this vast trove of data—which includes doctors’ notes, prescription histories, and visit summaries—to look for patterns regarding vaccine safety and chronic illness.
Kennedy recently expressed frustration with current federal data limitations, stating in a May interview: “We need a good health record system… we’ve had to go to the states and, luckily, we’ve got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on.”
The Facts vs. The Agenda
It is crucial to separate the administration’s current political goals from established medical science.
| Issue | Established Medical Consensus | The Current HHS Agenda |
| Vaccine Safety | Decades of global research confirm vaccines are safe and highly effective for the vast majority of people. | Questions the safety of vaccines and seeks to reduce childhood immunization recommendations. |
| Vaccines & Autism | Extensive studies have conclusively proven there is no link between vaccines and autism. | Seeks to comb through private medical records to find an unproven connection. |
| Current Data Systems | Systems like the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink are viewed by experts as robust and effective. | Rejected by the HHS Secretary as insufficient or broken. |
State Responses: A Divided Front
Federal officials have been meeting with state HIE leaders to pitch a massive new surveillance system. One proposal outlined a plan to feed 90% of the U.S. population’s medical records to the HHS by 2028, paying states $3 per person annually for the data.
The reaction from state leaders has been mixed:
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Maryland (Pushing Back): Craig Behm, head of Maryland’s exchange, declined the federal government’s request. He noted that sharing records for this purpose would require massive overhauls to privacy agreements and approvals from hospitals and research boards.
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Indiana (Hesitant): John Kansky, CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, sees the value in broad public health data sharing but expressed deep concern over the hyper-focus on vaccines, noting it is a highly sensitive and contentious issue. No data has been shared yet.
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Nebraska (Cooperating): Nebraska has emerged as a primary partner in this initiative. CyncHealth, the state’s dominant HIE, proposed a “federated trust model” to send data to the HHS.
The Financial Trail in Nebraska
Following the October meetings where Nebraska pitched its cooperation, massive federal and state funds changed hands:
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$18.7 Million: The amount the CDC awarded to Nebraska’s state health department in December 2025. Despite being the 38th most populous state, Nebraska received the highest payout in the nation.
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$13.6 Million: The amount awarded to CyncHealth via state contracts just weeks later in January 2026.
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$2.4 Million: The specific amount CyncHealth retained directly for Kennedy’s project, according to their spokesperson.
Jaime Bland, the former CEO of CyncHealth who helped spearhead this data-sharing effort, recently left her $420,000-a-year position. In April, she joined the “MAHA Institute,” a think tank founded by Trump and Kennedy allies to promote the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Why Medical Experts Are Skeptical
Beyond the glaring privacy concerns of handing over identifiable patient records to the federal government, experts doubt the data will even be useful for Kennedy’s goals.
Daniel Jernigan, a former top CDC official with over 30 years of experience in public health surveillance, noted that simply scraping electronic health records (EHR) has severe scientific limitations. EHRs only capture what happens during a specific doctor’s visit, lacking the comprehensive, controlled variables required for rigorous medical research.
Furthermore, Jernigan previously pointed HHS leadership toward massive, pre-existing, de-identified national databases designed for this exact type of safety research. The administration reportedly showed little interest, opting instead to seek out identifiable, individualized records from the states.
As the administration continues to push for this data ahead of the midterm elections, patient privacy advocates and the medical community remain on high alert. The HHS has yet to provide clear answers on exactly how many states are participating, or how they plan to protect the deeply personal health information of millions of Americans.
