Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Health Secretary, outlined an expansive plan to collect, consolidate and analyse comprehensive health data from across American government agencies and private companies at a Maha Institute event. He proposed connecting medical records, lifestyle information, insurance claims and pharmaceutical data, then using artificial intelligence to search for patterns and potential links between vaccines, environmental exposures and chronic disease. Kennedy stated the aim is to address what he termed a "chronic disease epidemic" and said such unified datasets would allow researchers to conduct studies in seconds rather than years.

The initiative would centralise data from the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with Kennedy highlighting the value of Medicaid records covering hundreds of millions of lives and Medicare data on older Americans. He emphasized AI's capacity to identify patterns across millions of health records and noted that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently told him the HHS now uses generative AI more than any other federal agency. The Maha Institute hosting the event is headed by Mark Gorton, an outspoken anti-vaccine activist, raising questions about the context and intent behind the health data initiative.