Summary:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Historical Context:

8/18/1939

German officials ordered the registration of all newborn babies and children under three years of age who showed signs of severe mental or physical disabilities. This order highlighted the participation of midwives. They were paid a small sum for each infant they reported. Parents were encouraged to surrender their children with disabilities to the care of state-run residential clinics. There, medical staff secretly murdered the children by starvation or lethal injection.

As German policymakers shifted the country’s economy onto a war footing, they began to view people with disabilities as a financial, as well as genetic, burden. The so-called “racial hygiene” policies of Nazi Germany took a radical turn. Portrayed falsely in propaganda as “mercy deaths,” the secret, so-called “euthansia” program soon expanded to include adults with disabilities as well.

Aktion T4 - September, 1939:

Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ]) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia which targeted people with disabilities in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients “deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination” and then administer to them a “mercy death” (Gnadentod). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a “euthanasia note”, backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.

The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. Between 275,000 and 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions.