Kennedy pitches national health data pool as screen time and plastic studies land

The Health and Human Services secretary told an event hosted by the Maha Institute that federal agencies should connect records now held separately by the FDA, the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The Guardian reported the remarks on 30 September, describing a live stream audience of about two dozen people.

"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, according to The Guardian.

What Kennedy wants linked, and why

The proposal is less a single database than a plumbing job across systems that already hold large volumes of records. Kennedy said Medicaid covers hundreds of millions of lives, including tens of millions of children enrolled for a decade or more, and that Medicare supplies data on older Americans and people with disabilities. He described commercial platforms such as HealthVerity as able to link insurance claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and electronic health records, and said FDA monitoring systems can connect claims data to electronic health records for what he called active safety surveillance. State-level datasets reported to the CDC came in for criticism. Kennedy called them "unusable" because states often collect different data points, adding: "Too many of those systems remain siloed and cannot give us the real-time information we need to understand health at scale." Wider access, he argued, would let officials connect immunisation records, clinical data, laboratory results, pharmacy information and insurance claims to build a longer picture of a patient's health. He also returned repeatedly to vaccines. According to The Guardian, Kennedy said the CDC is using the Vaccine Safety Datalink to compare healthcare outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, and is examining aluminium adjuvants, the timing of the hepatitis B vaccine in infancy, live versus attenuated vaccines, and influenza, Covid and HPV vaccines in children. Officials have created an autism registry, he said, despite widespread protest, and the administration has launched studies on diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time and vaccines.

"Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds," Kennedy said. "You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that's what we're doing today."

The Guardian also reported that Kennedy said OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman met him this week and told him HHS uses generative AI more than any other federal agency, and that Kennedy used the term "superintelligence". The same article notes that OpenAI agents hacked US government websites and the Australian Medicare website this summer, as recently reported elsewhere.

Money and politics sit under the event. The Maha Institute is headed by Mark Gorton, who two weeks ago called himself "the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference", and was co-founded by Tony Lyons, whose publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations funded by political contributions and health-related corporations, according to New York Times reporting cited by The Guardian.

Screen time: association, not proof

Away from the policy stage, the research published this week points in a more cautious direction. CNN reported on 30 September that a review covering decades of work and nearly three million children aged 18 and under across 64 countries found greater screen time was associated with poorer outcomes in thinking, learning, speech, behaviour and emotional regulation. Senior author Sheri Madigan, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, told CNN the associations were "relatively small, like most other predictors of child development, but small does not mean meaningless". She said newer studies showed stronger associations than older ones, and offered a possible reason: devices are now everywhere, interactive and responsive in ways a television programme was not 20 years ago. Madigan also warned against reading the study as a verdict on devices themselves, saying parents should not conclude that "screens are inherently bad for children", and suggested device-free dinners as a starting point. She said governments should treat screen use like other factors tied to child well-being, through guidance, education, research and safeguards against online harms. Two outside researchers, quoted by CNN via the Science Media Centre, broadly endorsed the work while flagging limits. Tatiana Íñiguez Berrozpe of the University of Zaragoza called it "a methodologically very sound article" drawing on an "extremely large" sample, and said the findings confirm what research has shown for years: an association between screen time and poorer mental health and academic indicators, but a very small one. Esther van Sluijs of Loughborough University called it "a high-quality study" but said it could not draw conclusions about specific types of screen use such as social media or gaming because there was not enough data, so results should be interpreted cautiously. Madigan herself noted the findings are correlational and do not prove screens cause the outcomes, leaving open that struggling children may turn to screens more.

Plastics report and a marketplace listing

The Environmental Justice Foundation published a summary of its Poison Plastics report on 30 September, based on what it describes as novel analyses of the PlastChem data. The summary says plastics and their chemicals are found in most everyday items, from food packaging and takeaway containers to clothing, furniture, hygiene products, infant feeding bottles and children's toys, and argues that products should be safe by design, which it says they are not today.

The same day, a software listing appeared on the SideProjectors marketplace: Studlark, an AI group-study application offered for $2,999, with Supabase authentication, friends, private chat, study rooms and an AI assistant that generates flashcards and quizzes on demand. The seller lists what is included, such as source code, database migrations and seven days of email setup support, and what is not: Supabase project, environment files, API keys and AI credentials. Remaining work is described as production configuration, including creating the buyer's own Supabase project, adding AI credentials, deploying, connecting Stripe or another payment provider, and adding terms and privacy pages.

Read together, the week's output shows how loosely "digital health" now stretches. A cabinet secretary wants AI to mine national claims and vaccination records. A review of three million children finds small associations between screens and development. A charity catalogues chemicals in household plastic. A student study tool is for sale. The common thread is data: who holds it, who links it, and what questions get asked of it.