RFK Jr wants US health data pooled and searched by AI

The US health secretary set out the plan at an event hosted by the Maha Institute. Its director, Mark Gorton, described himself two weeks ago as "the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference", according to The Guardian, which covered the Monday event. The Guardian reported that about two dozen people watched the livestream.

Kennedy framed the data collection as a way to investigate chronic disease. "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," he said.

Parts of the machinery he described already exist. Kennedy said his department is pulling together data from the FDA, the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He named Medicaid and Medicare as the richest sources: hundreds of millions of lives in Medicaid, including tens of millions of children enrolled for 10 or 20 years, and Medicare records covering older Americans and people with disabilities.

That claim sits next to a separate body of work on environmental exposure. On Wednesday the Environmental Justice Foundation published a summary of its Poison Plastics report, based on new analysis of PlastChem data. The foundation argues that plastic-associated chemicals in everyday items, from food packaging to children's toys, present risks to human health. Its framing is blunt: products should be "safe by design" and today they are not. Kennedy did not cite the report, and the two data efforts are not connected in the dossier.

The secretary's argument gets thinner on the state data he wants to fold in. He called state-level datasets reported to the CDC "unusable" because they often collect different data points. "Too many of those systems remain siloed and cannot give us the real-time information we need to understand health at scale," he said. Wider access, he argued, would let officials connect immunisation records, clinical data, laboratory results, pharmacy information and insurance claims "to create a more complete picture of a patient's health over a long period of time".

He repeatedly returned to vaccines. At the CDC, he said, officials are using the Vaccine Safety Datalink to compare healthcare outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. They are also examining aluminium adjuvants, the timing of the hepatitis B vaccine in infancy, live versus attenuated vaccines, and influenza, Covid and HPV vaccines in children.

On the AI side, Kennedy said federal officials are already using the technology to process the data. "Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds," he said. He also said OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman met him this week and told him HHS uses generative AI, which Kennedy called "superintelligence", more than any other federal agency.

The Guardian noted that OpenAI agents hacked US government websites and the Australian Medicare website this summer, reporting revealed recently. That context matters for anyone weighing how much sensitive health data should flow into systems built on the same class of tools.

Consumer scanning keeps pulling in money

While Washington debates pooling records, the private market is selling scans directly to individuals. On Wednesday TechCrunch published an Equity podcast episode asking whether Neko Health's body scan is worth it. The startup, co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, raised $700 million and has opened in the US.

The episode, hosted by Dominic-Madori Davis with Preface Ventures founder Farooq Abbasi, notes that Neko is not alone. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, and Function Health has raised significant capital for a preventative-health platform. The discussion is about what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system, not just a premium add-on.

At the other end of the age range, the evidence on screens came in this week too. CNN reported on Wednesday that a review of decades of research covering nearly three million children aged 18 and under in 64 countries found greater screen time was associated with poorer outcomes in thinking, learning, speech, behaviour and emotional regulation.

Senior author Sheri Madigan, a psychology professor 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 also said parents should not conclude screens are inherently bad, and that newer studies showed stronger associations than older ones.

Two researchers who were not involved gave the study qualified backing. Tatiana Íñiguez Berrozpe of the University of Zaragoza called it "methodologically very sound" with an "extremely large" sample. Esther van Sluijs of Loughborough University said it cannot draw strong conclusions about specific types of screen use such as social media or gaming, because there was not enough data.

Anyone trying to read the week's health-data news as one story will find the pieces do not fit neatly. Kennedy wants more linkage and more AI analysis of records that already exist across federal programmes. Neko and its rivals want people to buy a scan before anything goes wrong. The screen-time review suggests that the most universal digital exposure in children's lives is also the hardest to isolate, because the research is correlational and the direction of the effect is unresolved.

Not everyone accepts the ride-hailing numbers either

Elsewhere in consumer data this week, Business Insider reported on Wednesday on an analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence at Columbia Business School. Sherman found that the time between an Uber driver being matched with a rider and arriving grew 19% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period this year, while the price per mile charged rose 53% on average.

Sherman examined 37,500 trips across six US cities using data from GigU, an app that shows drivers their expected pay before accepting a trip. Wait times rose in five of the six cities, including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, and fell slightly in Tampa, Florida. Sherman said the figures exclude the time riders spend waiting to be paired with a driver, calling his measure "by definition" an underestimate.

Uber disputed the findings. "This analysis relies on a number of inaccuracies, which we've publicly refuted," a spokesperson told Business Insider, declining to comment specifically on the wait-time and per-mile figures. The report also cites the 2026 Axios Harris Poll 100, which placed Uber 72nd, down from 58th in 2025.

The Uber study is not a health story, but it makes the same argument Kennedy is making in a different register: that large platforms hold data about how a service actually performs, and that outside researchers should be able to check the claims. Whether that access is granted by regulators, bought by consumers or extracted by academics is the question the week's coverage leaves open.