The Brief

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.

Federal officials met with leaders of the state-run health information exchange systems several times over the past year and asked how the personal medical records they maintain could be used for vaccine research, according to seven people who participated in the discussions or were familiar with them.

Craig Behm, who runs the Maryland health information exchange, said Kennedy’s team asked about how the vast trove of medical records they store from hospitals and health systems could be used to study vaccines.

“If this administration wants to conduct research on the effectiveness of vaccines, are you saying you all can help us conduct that research?” Behm recalled being asked by a top official at HHS’ health information technology office.

Last June, Behm and leaders of other state exchanges met with Kennedy’s top advisers to discuss sharing more medical data with federal agencies. The state organizations followed up with a pitch in October for a new surveillance system that would give the federal health department “real-time, 24-hour data feeds on opioid and chronic disease trends” within a year, according to a presentation reviewed by KFF Health News. Under the proposal, HHS would get data from 90% of the population’s medical records by 2028.

Administration officials regularly asked during the meetings how the records could be used to monitor vaccine safety. Kennedy has rejected the federal government’s current vaccine-monitoring systems; decades of research has shown immunizations are safe and effective for most people.

“Vaccine safety, or whatever words you want to use, has come up pretty consistently in those conversations,” said John Kansky, CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange.

Kansky sees the potential value of sharing information from the exchanges for public health but is worried about the focus on vaccines: “It’s like, oh man, I wish you would have picked something that pushed fewer buttons for people.”

A system to monitor chronic disease

Nearly every state has at least one health information exchange — often regulated by state laws and run by private companies or nonprofits — that enables hospitals and health systems to immediately share patients’ medical records with one another. The systems allow doctors and nurses to quickly pull up nearly anyone’s medical history and records at emergency rooms or share after-visit summaries and notes with patients’ primary care providers, for example.

In certain circumstances — most often dealing with cases of infectious diseases such as measles or flu — the exchanges notify public health authorities, like the state health department or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Using the exchanges for broader public health purposes is not an unusual idea in itself. But it can present privacy, legal, and ethical complications, health officials say.

In the end, Behm said his organization in Maryland declined to share more data with the federal government for vaccine research, noting that sharing medical records for that purpose would require a rash of approvals from hospitals, state political leaders, and research boards. Any new data-sharing agreement should also have a clear, detailed framework outlining what would be shared and with whom, he added.

“A number of us said, ‘We can’t do anything our agreements don’t allow us to do, so no,’” Behm said. Indeed, most health information exchanges have contractual restrictions on who can access clinical data.

Kansky said Indiana is still weighing whether to provide additional data for Kennedy’s project, and that nothing has yet been shared.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard did not answer questions about how many states are participating in Kennedy’s project, what new data the agency is collecting, how much the federal government is spending on the initiative, how it is protecting patient privacy, or who has access to the data.

“HHS is strengthening public health surveillance and modernizing data systems to better understand and combat the childhood chronic disease epidemic as part of Secretary Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” Hilliard said in an emailed statement. “Americans deserve robust systems to monitor the drivers of chronic illness.”

Kennedy has asserted, without evidence, that vaccines can cause chronic illness.

A Kennedy partner in Nebraska

At least one state has been cooperative.

The former leader of Nebraska’s state health information exchange has led the effort to share data from medical records with the federal government.

Jaime Bland, former CEO of CyncHealth — the Nebraska health information exchange used by most hospitals and health systems in the state — said several states are looking to “open up channels” to provide more analysis to Kennedy’s team.

“They’re looking at the data differently and providing some insights back to the CDC,” Bland told KFF Health News.

Bland was among a group who proposed that CyncHealth would help kick off the initiative, according to a 43-slide PowerPoint presented to federal officials during an October meeting.

CyncHealth and other state health information exchanges would “ingest data from hospitals, clinics, laboratories, pharmacies, payers, and social services agencies,” then “link claims and clinical records through a master patient index.”

Data from the exchanges “will be deidentified where appropriate,” according to one slide.

The federal government would pay the exchanges for furnishing the records, according to the proposal: $3 a person, annually.

Officials would “frame publicly that this is not a new database, but a federated trust model that delivers real-time data for all HHS missions,” the presentation reads.

After the meeting, Nebraska’s health department was awarded a large grant from the CDC, and CyncHealth in turn got millions of dollars from the state.

On Dec. 19, the CDC announced new funding under its Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program, which sends money to state and local health departments for lab work, health information enhancements, and solutions for outbreaks.

Nebraska’s state health department was awarded $18.7 million — the most of any state last year, though Nebraska is the 38th most populous state. By comparison, Texas received $9.2 million, and California got $10.8 million.

CyncHealth was then awarded three contracts totaling $13.6 million from the state health department just weeks later, on Jan. 9 and Jan. 16, according to a publicly accessible database of state contracts.

Grace McNamara, a spokesperson for CyncHealth, said it retained $2.4 million of the funding for Kennedy’s project; the remaining money was distributed to “other participating states and various vendor organizations for implementation support.”

A former CDC official who was aware of the transaction, but not authorized to speak publicly about it, confirmed the money was intended for CyncHealth to supply data for Kennedy’s initiative to look at vaccines and autism. McNamara said that the “work is focused on improving outcomes related to acute and chronic illnesses.”

“The referenced project is not research, but rather a proof-of-concept project on how health information exchange and public health can work together to improve health outcomes and is not specific to autism,” she said in an emailed statement.

McNamara did not answer questions about what type of medical data is being provided to the federal health department or whether patients’ identifying information is removed.

Bland left her post at CyncHealth — where she was paid nearly $420,000 a year — in December. She was named in April as the chief data strategist for the MAHA Institute — a think tank founded by allies of Kennedy and Trump to advance their Make America Healthy Again movement.

Bland agreed with Kennedy that data from state health information exchanges could provide more insight into autism’s causes or vaccine injuries.

"The data is so fragmented, so modeled when it comes to population health and public health, that we lose sight of the individual stories,” Bland said. She told a story she had heard about a woman who had a seizure after receiving the HPV vaccine.

“You know, the vaccine is safe — it absolutely is — but it wasn’t safe for her,” Bland said. “As public health officials, we say the vaccine is safe. But there are cases where it is not.”

Daniel Jernigan, a former top CDC official who left the agency last summer, said he tried to point Kennedy to data that would help the health secretary study vaccine safety and autism.

After 31 years at the CDC overseeing public health surveillance, emerging infectious diseases, and the influenza divisions, Jernigan thought the solution was simple. The secretary could work with researchers to obtain huge databases pulled from health systems nationwide and maintained by major electronic health records companies.

Those databases are deidentified, meaning they don’t include patient names or other information that can identify individuals. Jernigan said Kennedy didn’t seem interested.

Instead, as The New York Times first reported, the health secretary dispatched two top advisers — Archer and Hannah Anderson, his former deputy chief of staff — to the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta last July to download millions of identifiable patient records directly from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the system the health agency uses to investigate complications from vaccines. The records, though, were decades old.

Jernigan said the federal government has limited legal authority to access medical records from state health information exchanges. In any case, examining those records may provide a view of a person’s medical history that will not necessarily produce answers to Kennedy’s questions about vaccines and autism.

“If they’re just using the electronic health record data, there are limits to that,” Jernigan said. “If they’re only looking at electronic health record data, all you’re going to get is what was captured in the encounter. It’s not going to be very satisfying.”

KFF Health News data reporter Maia Rosenfeld contributed to this article.

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 article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration advise consumers to avoid eating shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

Health officials analyzed 190 cases of cyclospora in Michigan where a person who fell ill reported eating at Taco Bell. Officials found that 90% of those people said they ate iceberg lettuce.

More than 1,644 sick people in this multi-state cyclospora outbreak reported eating at Taco Bell in those states starting May 13, according to the agencies. There have been 94 hospitalizations and no deaths reported.

The FDA traced this subset of cases identified nationwide to a single supplier of contaminated iceberg lettuce from Mexico, but did not name the supplier.

FDA says it's working with the supplier to identify other locations where the contaminated lettuce has been distributed. The agency notes this is one large cluster that is epidemiologically related. There are other clusters across the country that may or may not be associated. Cases have been identified in 34 states.

Taco Bell issued a statement July 16 that it took "immediate action to voluntarily remove potentially impacted lettuce from a supplier in select states." The statement also said the lettuce would be removed from the supply chain nationwide and replaced within 24 hours.

A wide reach for salad suppliers

The Associated Press, citing an unnamed federal official, has reported that Taylor Farms was the supplier of the lettuce. NPR has not independently confirmed that, and Taylor Farms has not responded to a request for comment.

A handful of big players with integrated supply chains and advanced processing infrastructure, including Taylor Farms, dominate the bagged lettuce and salad industry in the U.S.

With such a big reach, a single supplier can provide lettuce products to a number of retailers, so it's possible that additional clusters of cyclospora around the country could be linked to lettuce from the same supplier. It's also possible that there are multiple sources and suppliers linked to other cases around the country.

The FDA and CDC say the investigation is continuing.

How to protect yourself

The symptoms of the illness include watery diarrhea, loss of appetite and fatigue, and people contract it by eating or drinking contaminated food or water.

To protect yourself from the parasite, the CDC advises people to follow standard food safety handling protocols. "Wash your hands and any fresh produce thoroughly under running water before eating, cutting or cooking. This will reduce the risk of infection. Cooking kills the parasite, so heating food to 158 F or 70 C or higher is effective," said Dr. Gwen Biggerstaff with the CDC's Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases.

If people do develop symptoms, health officials advise people to contact their healthcare providers to be tested specifically for cyclospora. Routine stool tests often don't include that test.

"People with symptoms should stay well-hydrated and avoid preparing food for others while acutely ill, out of general caution, even though person-to-person spread is very unlikely," Biggerstaff said.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Some fans with tickets to the 2028 Olympics were a tad suspicious this week when an email offering them a refund landed in their inboxes.

The email offered cash back for an accidentally included tax that "was partially charged in error" on their tickets to the Olympic Games. The subject line should read “Official LA28 Ticket Tax Refund”.

The L.A. Olympics organizing committee says it's the real deal, though. According to LA28, refunds are being sent to people who bought tickets to Olympic events at the Intuit Dome and to football matches in Columbus, Ohio. They were erroneously charged local taxes that didn't apply.

For most purchases at Intuit Dome, the refund is under $11, according to LA28 spokeswoman Jacie Prieto Lopez. In Columbus, the refund is under $40.

Ticket purchasers eligible for the refund can accept it online or wait for a check to arrive in the mail.

California bars utilities from cutting off power to customers who fall behind on their bills when it’s dangerously hot outside — a basic safety protection. Losing power in some rural areas can also mean losing water, and in cities, having no way to cool down can be dangerous, even deadly, when hot weather spans several days.

California regulators concluded more than a year ago that rules protecting delinquent customers from power shutoffs during heat waves weren’t strong enough. They ordered the state’s largest utilities to come up with better safeguards.

When the utilities unveiled their plan in December, their proposals barely changed anything, the commission concluded on Thursday, finding their proposal “does not offer sufficient health protections for ratepayers.”

The commission had set a May 1 deadline for the new rules. Utilities missed it, and consumer advocates filed emergency motions to force action.

As another stretch of dangerous heat gripped the state, the California Public Utilities Commission wrote stronger rules itself. In a 4-0 vote, the commission lowered the temperature at which utilities must stop shutting off power to delinquent customers, from 100 to 90 degrees, and ordered utilities to adopt a more protective, region-specific heat standard within six months.

A battle to define extreme heat 

During a record heat wave two years ago — the hottest July in California history — The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, asked the utilities commission to revisit its definition of extreme heat. The group’s emergency request argued that “heat kills more people directly than any other weather-related hazard.”

The rules already barred electric utilities from disconnecting residential customers for nonpayment if forecasted temperatures soared above 100 degrees within 72 hours.

But a single statewide threshold, the group argued, didn’t account for how differently Californians experience heat depending on where they live.

Regulators declined to treat the request as an emergency, but ordered the utilities to come up with a plan for changing the 100-degree threshold by working with advocates and others.

The utilities proposed using CalHeatScore, a newly created state tool that scores heat by ZIP code – from Level 0 to 4 – using local health data and historical impacts, taking into account data on nearby cooling centers, as well as the number of children and seniors, who can be more susceptible to extreme heat.

The problem: the utilities proposed setting the cutoff threshold at Level 3 — a higher bar than advocates wanted — and keeping 100 degrees as the backstop when the index wasn’t available.

Advocates filed protests seeking a wider safety net, arguing for a lower Level 2 index score and a 90-degree backup threshold.

Utilities said they could not meet the deadline because CalHeatScore’s own data system, run by the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, was not yet ready to support them. Advocates countered that the utilities offered little evidence for sticking with the higher 100-degree threshold.

By May, with utilities still behind schedule, The Utility Reform Network joined with the San Diego-based Utility Consumers’ Action Network, the National Consumer Law Center and the Center for Accessible Technology, asking the commission to intervene.

The commission sides with advocates

This week the commission rejected the utilities’ proposal, siding with advocates. The path the utilities were proposing would be “no different” than prior practice. The resolution noted the extreme heat threshold is already below 100 degrees in 41 of California’s 58 counties.

A 90-degree day might be routine in dry, inland cities such as Bakersfield or Fresno, but such temperatures could be atypically dangerous in coastal or mountainous communities where fewer homes have air conditioning and people are less acclimated to the heat.

San Francisco, for instance, defines heat as extreme when temperatures climb above 85 degrees. In the far northwest county of Del Norte, extreme heat means anything above 76.8 degrees, the commission said.

“A single threshold temperature level needs to be more protective of residents in areas of the state that are not accustomed to high temperatures,” the commission wrote in its resolution.

Utilities move to comply 

While the utilities had wanted a narrower safety net for customers, they are now stressing they will comply with the more protective standard.

Last December, the major investor-owned utilities had together argued that extending protections to consumers at lower heat scores would halt disconnections too often, deepen unpaid balances, and add costs without a comparable health benefit. In a January filing, according to a PG&E spokesperson, the utilities argued that the 90-degree threshold was “overbroad.”

The protections would apply only to shutoffs for unpaid bills. They would not prevent outages caused by equipment failures, wildfire-prevention shutoffs, or other emergencies. Nevertheless, advocates say the changes are important.

“When electricity is shut off to a home, it can have a sort of a cascading effect of problems on tenants,” said Jason Zeller, an attorney with the Utility Consumers Action Network. “If tenants don't have electric service, they can be subject to eviction; if they have children, they can lose child custody.”

Reached ahead of the vote, all three utilities said they were prepared to comply with the commission’s new rules. Edison said the resolution would strengthen protections during extreme heat and that it was ready to change its disconnection policies. SDG&E said it supported the added safeguards and would implement the commission’s final requirements.

“Disconnection is a last resort at PG&E, only after multiple attempts to contact customers and offer payment plans and assistance programs,” said PG&E spokesperson Adrienne Moore. The region-specific standard is expected to be implemented within six months.

The commission’s independent Public Advocates Office had pressed for stronger protections throughout the process, formally opposing the utilities’ plan. Director Linda Serizawa the vote would provide consumers with “protection that takes effect when they need it most.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Crenshaw Chamber of Commerce is spreading the word about a new loan program for business owners across the state. 

The World Stage Ready Forgivable Loan Program is presented by TMC Community Capital, a nonprofit microlender, which is offering small business loans with favorable terms including 12 months to repay the loan, 0% interest rate, a year-long deferment, if needed, and up to 100% forgiveness if program requirements are met. 

The loan program looks to attract small businesses that are preparing for major events, want to serve more customers, grow their businesses with confidence and want access to expert support, according to TMC’s promotional flyer. 

“A lot of small businesses simply don’t have information about these programs,” said JC Lacey, president of Crenshaw Chamber of Commerce. “It’s our goal to make sure they get it.” 

The loans are funded through a $700,000 grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation and range from $5,000 to $10,000, Lacey said. TMC announced its partnership with Wells Fargo on LinkedIn last month. 

“The loan amounts may seem small but these loans can help a business grow or save it from failing for an entire year,” Lacey said. 

Other community partners assisting with the loan program are the California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Yacanex Community, an educational entrepreneurship organization based in the Bay area. 

Want to know more and/or apply for the program? See the details below:

What are the eligibility requirements? 

• Applicants must be a for-profit business owner in California. 
• The business must have generated revenue for at least 12 months. 
• No minimum FICO score is required. 
• Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, are accepted. 
• Some excluded industries include: adult entertainment, cannabis, rideshare, real estate, weapons/ammunition. (If you’re not sure, contact TMC for clarification)

How much funding can my small business receive?

• Loans awarded to eligible applicants can range from $5,000 to $10,000. 
• Applicants who are approved will have 12 months to repay the loan.
• The loans will have a 0% interest rate.
• Repayment of the loan can be deferred for 12 months, if needed. 
• Eligibility for 100% forgiveness if program requirements are met. 

For more information about the loan program, contact one of the following:

• Email TMC Community Capital: info@tmccommunitycapital.org 
• Email California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce: presta@cahcc.com 
• Email Yacanex Community: informes@ybusinessgroup.com 
• For more information about eligibility requirements: TMC Community Capital