Robert F Kennedy Jr outlined a sweeping vision for collecting, sharing and analyzing American health information during a Maha Institute event hosted by a close ally and outspoken vaccine opponent. About two dozen people watched the event through its live stream on Monday.

Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, suggested connecting medical and lifestyle information ranging from doctor visits to exercise. The data could then be shared with government officials and independent researchers and searched using AI.

He said such analysis could examine potential links between vaccines and outcomes including autism and mortality. “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.

The Maha Institute is led by Mark Gorton, who recently described himself as “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference”. Tony Lyons helped found the institute, and his publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations using political contributions and funding from corporations related to health, according to New York Times reporting.

Kennedy said his effort has focused on combining information from agencies under his authority, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He also promoted portable health records that could make information easier for patients to access while opening records to government and outside researchers.

Medicaid offers a large population for health research, Kennedy said, including tens of millions of children who have participated for 10 or 20 years. He said the Trump administration is tracking exposures, interventions and claims data, while Medicare provides extensive information about older Americans and people with disabilities.

Kennedy said FDA monitoring systems can connect claims data with electronic health records for active safety surveillance. Commercial platforms such as HealthVerity can also link insurance claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and electronic records.

He criticized datasets reported by states to the CDC as unusable because states often collect different information. Wider access, he argued, could connect immunization records, clinical information, laboratory results, pharmacy records and insurance claims to build a more complete view of a patient’s health over time.

Federal officials are using AI to process those records, Kennedy said. “Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that’s what we’re doing today.”

Kennedy said OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman told him this week that HHS uses generative AI more than any other federal agency. Kennedy referred to the technology as “superintelligence”. Recent reporting revealed that OpenAI agents hacked US government websites and the Australian Medicare website this summer.

Officials have created an autism registry despite widespread protest. Kennedy also said the administration has launched studies examining possible roles for diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time and vaccines in the development of illness.

At the CDC, officials are using the Vaccine Safety Datalink to compare healthcare outcomes among vaccinated and unvaccinated people, Kennedy said. Researchers are also examining aluminum adjuvants, the timing of the hepatitis B vaccine in infancy, live and attenuated vaccines, and influenza, Covid and HPV vaccines in children.

Kennedy said officials are using Medicaid and linked data to study vaccination during pregnancy and subsequent childhood outcomes. FDA researchers are also using the Biologics Effectiveness and Safety System and Medicare information to replicate and expand earlier studies involving vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, aluminum and asthma, and maternal influenza vaccines and autism spectrum disorder.

Kennedy returned to the restricted Vaccine Safety Datalink access given to Mark and David Geier in the early 2000s. The two were blocked after violating confidentiality agreements, and neither was affiliated with a research institution when their access was suspended.

They created their own institutional review board, according to the Maryland state board of physicians, which suspended Mark Geier’s medical license. The board also charged David Geier with practicing medicine without a licence.

Kennedy called the Vaccine Safety Datalink an “unworkable system” and said the administration wants to prepare health information for use by hundreds of outside researchers. The data after 2002 is safeguarded by healthcare organizations for health privacy reasons.

Gorton promoted open data at Monday’s event, arguing that organizations outside government could fill gaps and apply political pressure. Less than two weeks earlier, he had called vaccines a “public health nightmare”, spread misinformation about their ingredients and claimed that 40% of children are injured by vaccines through allergy, asthma and eczema diagnoses.

At the 17 September conference, Gorton called vaccination’s success a “complete fabrication” and “massive fraud”. He also claimed a 1950s polio outbreak was caused by pesticides and said, “More vaccines, more autism. It’s that simple.” Kennedy thanked his longtime friend for his “incredible support”.