​U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pursuing federal government access to most Americans’ medical records, in a quest to research a link between vaccines and autism — a connection the medical establishment studied for decades and flatly rejects.

The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking data from little-known state systems that allow hospitals and clinics to exchange detailed, identifiable patient information, KFF Health News has learned.

In private meetings, some public health leaders have objected to giving Kennedy’s team access to such data, raising doubts that it’s legal or that the information would even be useful.

They have also expressed concerns about allowing the federal government to peer into the minutiae of Americans’ medical records, which could mean viewing anything from doctors’ notes to prescription history. HHS has offered no insight into how it will protect or handle the personal health information it obtains.

But Kennedy told KFF Health News that medical records are key to investigating the cause of autism, vaccine safety, and chronic diseases. And millions of dollars in grant money has poured into a Nebraska nonprofit that has assisted Kennedy’s effort, according to state records.

He and his advisers have been frustrated that federal access to Americans’ medical records has been limited.

“We need a good health record system, and one of the things that really surprised me most when I came into office is that there is — that the systems are broken,” Kennedy said in a May interview. “We’ve had to go to the states and, luckily, we’ve got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on. Those studies are in motion.”

HHS has not publicly announced any new projects involving medical records and autism or vaccine research. Kennedy faced blowback last year when he proposed compiling the medical records of people with autism to create a federal disease registry — which health department officials later disputed was underway.

But Kennedy said in May, “We have a whole pipeline of studies that will be done over the next year.”

Though the White House has steered Kennedy away from further changes to U.S. vaccine policy ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections, President Donald Trump has regularly echoed Kennedy’s doubts about vaccine safety and last week signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for children.

Kennedy’s political appointees and allies — including William “Reyn” Archer III, a former Texas health official and vaccine critic whom Kennedy hired as a senior adviser — have led the initiative for the health department to collect and examine medical records.

William “Reyn” Archer III, a former Texas health commissioner, attends the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting at Centers for Disease C  

​PORT HURON, Mich. — State health officials urged parents in several counties to vaccinate babies against measles ahead of schedule this spring as cases multiplied in Michigan. The outbreaks of the highly contagious virus — which can lead to brain swelling, deafness, and death — came as parents are opting school-age kids out of vaccinations at a record-high rate.

It’s a situation state officials have spent more than a decade trying to avoid. For years, they’ve been trying to make it harder for parents to send their kids to school unvaccinated.

But those efforts have backfired in places like St. Clair County, in Michigan’s conservative Thumb region. Remington Nevin, the county’s medical director, has declared “a new era of vaccine choice.” Local parents there can now bypass the usual protocols and get school vaccine waivers via email, days after they fill out a brief digital form.

State health officials aren’t fighting it.

Remington Nevin is the medical director for the St. Clair County Health Department in Michigan. The county is the first in the state to make vaccine waivers available to parents entirely online. Parents who have “felt pressured” into getting vaccines “are going to experience a new era of vaccine choice in St. Clair County,” Nevin said at a January board meeting. (Kate Wells/KFF Health News)

In fact, Michigan’s health agency has been helping more than 30 counties move away from a state policy once credited with sharply reducing the number of parents who opted their kids out of shots.

In 2015, the state started requiring parents seeking waivers to first attend a vaccine education session, in person, at their local health department.

But in the post-covid era, local health officials say, the sessions became hostile, ineffective, and sometimes even unsafe for staff. One high school called police last fall over an escalating dispute with parents who refused to obtain a state-recognized waiver for their children, with a sheriff’s deputy warning the parents that they could face criminal charges.

In response, the state has helped create a hybrid waiver process for dozens of counties, allowing parents to take a brief vaccine education course online while still requiring they get their waivers signed in person. It’s part of a broader shift in strategy in a state that had some of the most polarizing and politically divisive covid restrictions.

At Michigan schools where only 30% to 40% of students are now vaccinated, it is “simply not possible to keep diseases like measles at bay,” said Natasha Bagdasarian, the state’s chief medical officer. “And when one of these measles cases ends up in a low-immunization community, that’s when the ember really has a chance to expand and become a wildfire.”

A Short-Lived Success Story

In 2014, Michigan had the fourth-highest vaccine waiver rate in the country.

Health officials suspected some parents were just signing waivers   

​The Trump administration’s deep cuts to federal health agencies have become a political liability after a deadly outbreak of hantavirus aboard a cruise ship and the spread of an even more fearsome disease, Ebola, in Africa.

At least that’s the way many Democrats see it.

They have seized on the situation to charge that the U.S. is ill prepared to respond to outbreaks — let alone a pandemic — after President Donald Trump slashed jobs and funding for public health infrastructure and pandemic preparedness. Infectious disease specialists have called on the White House to reverse cuts and rejoin the World Health Organization.

The White House, meanwhile, is on the defensive, trying to reassure a pandemic-weary public that the federal government can still mount effective responses to infectious disease outbreaks.

The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underwent massive layoffs as part of an effort led by billionaire businessman Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, that also resulted in the cancellation of billions of dollars in federal contracts and grants.

“These outbreaks are unfolding at a time when the U.S. public health infrastructure is under significant strain,” said Leana Wen, an emergency medicine physician and former Baltimore health commissioner. “The CDC currently lacks a director, the FDA lacks a director, there is no surgeon general, and many leaders with outbreak response management experience have left the federal government.”

The U.S. government has ordered quarantines and is monitoring potential exposures to hantavirus after an outbreak on a cruise ship. It is also implementing new restrictions for foreign travelers amid an Ebola outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo that has grown to more than 1,000 suspected cases. While neither situation is seen as likely to become a global pandemic, Democrats and infectious disease leaders have seized on the outbreaks to criticize the effects of the DOGE cuts and other administration public health policies.

The hantavirus cluster occurred on the MV Hondius, an expedition ship that left Argentina on April 1 for a monthlong sojourn with almost 150 people aboard. The earliest cases, including two deaths, were reported to the WHO on May 2. Three of 11 infected passengers have died. Hantavirus is typically spread to people from rodents, but this version, known as the Andes virus, can be passed person to person.

The Ebola outbreak has captured public attention, though no cases have been confirmed in the U.S. The virus — a rare strain called Bundibugyo, against which there are no proven vaccines or treatments — spread undetected for weeks, prompting WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to say he’s concerned about the “scale and speed” of the outbreak. Seven Americans, including a doctor exposed to the virus, were evacuated to Germany by the U.S. State Department.

Democra  

​Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed recent warnings about research-grade peptides and new colorectal cancer screening guidelines on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on May 27. She also discussed the Ebola outbreak centered on the Democratic Republic of Congo and whether it’s expected to spread on May 26.

Click here to watch Gounder discuss research-grade peptides on CBS Mornings.

Click here to watch Gounder discuss colorectal cancer screening on CBS Mornings.

Click here to watch Gounder discuss the Ebola outbreak on CBS Mornings.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://kffhealthnews.org/on-air/on-air-may-30-2026-celine-gounder-peptides-colorectal-cancer-ebola/”>article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://kffhealthnews.org”>KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
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​The Host

Julie Rovner

KFF Health News

@jrovner

@julierovner.bsky.social

Read Julie’s stories.

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by congressional Republicans in 2025, was supposed to backload cuts to health programs so they wouldn’t take effect until after the 2026 midterm elections. That’s not how things are working out, with numerous analyses showing insurance coverage is already starting to drop.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration claims that the coverage reductions prove its anti-fraud efforts are working. But those efforts are likely to affect far more people than just those who commit fraud against federal health programs.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Maya Goldman of Axios, Shefali Luthra of The 19th, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Maya Goldman

Axios

@mayagoldman_

@maya-goldman.bsky.social

Read Maya’s stories.

Shefali Luthra

The 19th

@shefali.bsky.social

Read Shefali’s stories.

Lauren Weber

The Washington Post

@LaurenWeberHP

@laurenweberhp.bsky.social

Read Lauren’s stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

Amid a recent decline in the number of Americans with health insurance, one affected group in particular stands out: children. Many kids are falling off the Medicaid rolls, largely because of the chilling effects of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and broader confusion about eligibility requirements.

Meanwhile, the high cost of health insurance is pressing people to seek alternatives, many of which offer few or no protections against large medical bills. On the campaign trail, high-profile Democrats are sounding the alarm about a problematic health ecosystem, even framing issues such as reproductive health in terms of affordability.

The Trump administration is raising eyebrows with its response to the emerging Ebola crisis as it works to keep American citizens exposed to the disease out of the country entirely. Countering previous government approaches, which prioritized not only public safety but also offering the best care available to Americans, this approach also stands in stark contrast with President Donald Trump’s d