Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan Wednesday to use medical data and records from people on Medicaid and Medicare to help study autism although experts say it’s unlikely to help reveal the condition’s root causes.
The program will involve a data sharing agreement between the National Institutes of Health, the government’s health research arm, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has access to claims data from nearly 150 million Americans across the country.
Autism existed long before there werre microplastics, and there’s no evidence that its prevalence is increasing (though the rate of diagnosis has increased due to greater awareness by health professionals and others).