Robert F Kennedy Jr laid out an expansive vision for collecting, sharing and analyzing US health information at a Maha event hosted by a close ally and outspoken anti-vaccine activist.

Medical and lifestyle data, from doctor’s visits to exercise, should be connected and shared with the government and independent researchers, where it can be searched by AI – including potential links between vaccines and health outcomes including autism and mortality, suggested Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine skeptic.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said at an event with the Maha Institute on Monday, with about two dozen people tuning into the live stream.

The Maha Institute is headed by Mark Gorton, who called himself “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference” two weeks ago. The institute was co-founded by Tony Lyons, whose publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations with funding from political contributions and health-related corporations, according to reporting by the New York Times.