The Brief

Can rebuilding 14 affordable rental units on one lot in Altadena be a model for building back more equitably? The Altadena Builds Back Foundation and its partners think so.

The subsidiary of the Pasadena Community Foundation that launched after the Eaton Fire announced today that it has awarded a nearly $6 million grant to Pasadena-based affordable housing provider Beacon Housing. The money will purchase a lot on Pine Street in West Altadena that had 14 rental units in a bungalow court and two duplexes before the fire. The grant covered the purchase, as well as debris cleanup. It also will fund the reconstruction, which is expected to be complete by the end of summer.

“We need to center renters because I think that they are often not included in the conversation,” said Palin Ngaotheppitak, Beacon’s executive director and an Altadena resident. “We've heard it said over the last 10 months, ‘Oh, they'll just go move somewhere else.’ But I think that they're much more vulnerable to homelessness.”

It’s the second grant awarded by the foundation — the first one of more than $4.5 million went to San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity to rebuild 22 single-family homes. Those homes are under construction — the first of which is right down the street from this new property.

“It just brings me, as an Altadena resident, a little bit more hope each time that we will rebuild, that we will come back and we are doing this in a way that is thoughtful of the future and future generations,” Ngaotheppitak said.

Palin Ngaotheppitak, executive director of Beacon Housing, holds the blueprint for the future affordable rental units.

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Molly O'Keeffe

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Courtesy Altadena Builds Back Foundation

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Why it matters

More than 77% of multi-family units in Altadena were destroyed in the Eaton Fire, according to data analyzed by the United Way. After the fire, many Altadena renters who were paying far below market rates were thrust into an unaffordable housing market.

A recent survey from the Eaton Fire Collab found that 72% of surveyed renters still are in need of housing and 68% experienced a total loss of their home.

“Some are couch surfing. People are displaced 20, 30 miles farther than they've ever been,” said the Rev. Mary Ann Harrison, pastor of Christ the Shepherd Lutheran Church in Altadena, which is near the bungalow court development.

Candice Kim, project director of the Altadena Builds Back Foundation, said the group wants to fund more projects.

“There is a desire to raise more funding, to have more funders come in and fund affordable housing or community-friendly projects,” Kim said. “And so this is our challenge to the rest of our funding community.”

How renters can apply

Previous tenants of the property will get priority to return; others will be selected via a lottery. Tenants will have to qualify as very low income — a two-person household, for example, would have to make less than $60,600 a year — and prove their housing was affected by the Eaton Fire.

“We felt that it was really important to focus on a project that we can keep affordable for a long time and that would be a symbol for others around how we can get renters to come back and how we preserve affordable housing in the community,” Ngaotheppitak said.

Construction is expected to be completed by late summer — to speed up the process and keep prices down, the units will all be prefab. The bungalows will be built by Clayton Homes and the duplexes by Malibu-based manufactured home builder the Home Gallery.

Once construction has moved forward significantly, there will be a specific sign-up for tenants interested in this property. Meanwhile, Eaton Fire survivors who need housing assistance can fill out Beacon’s interest form online.

A potent carcinogen may have spread to communities as far as nine miles downwind of the Eaton and Palisades fire burn zones during debris clean-up, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature.

A team of researchers has been studying the air pollution effects of clearing the remains of more than 16,000 homes and businesses destroyed in the 2025 fires.

Scientists with UCLA and UC Davis drove through Altadena and Pacific Palisades in an electric vehicle with mobile air monitors periodically over about seven months after the fires. They measured nanoparticles of hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6, within the cleanup areas. Paint, auto parts, electronics and fire retardant are possible sources, but more study is needed to understand where the chromium came from, the researchers said. They also detected other airborne metals, including lead and arsenic.

The researchers used computer modeling to understand how far those airborne particles may have spread beyond the immediate burn zones. About 3 million people live in the areas that could have been exposed, according to the scientists’ models.

The highest concentrations of nanoparticles — particles less than 1/1,000th the width of a human hair — were measured in March 2025, about two months into the debris removal effort in both burn zones. But the toxicity declined as time passed.

“ The good news is that some of those toxic metals, they were converted back to less toxic forms over time,” said Michael Kleeman, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis and lead author of the study. “So in the months after the wildfire, the threat from this sort of decayed away.”

In communities outside the burn zones, concentrations diluted further as the plume moved downwind, Kleeman said. By eight months after the fires, the researchers measured that heavy metal concentrations had fallen to background levels for the L.A. basin.

The research highlights how “even after the fire is over, the danger isn't gone,” Kleeman said.

An aerial view of properties cleared of fire debris in Altadena in July 2025.

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Mario Tama

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Getty Images

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Cleared lots in the Palisades Fire burn zone stretch into the distance.

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Qian Weizhong

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VCG / Associated Press

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How concerned should you be? 

The researchers and outside experts emphasized to LAist that the study’s findings do not prove widespread contamination of homes, businesses or the environment.

“ I hope we can get a message of caution out there, but not panic,” said Kleeman.

Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University post-disaster environmental risk researcher who was not involved in the study, said the research is far from proving what, if any, harm to human health could occur, especially because no indoor testing was carried out.

“Drawing a line from street-level detections to indoor exposure, without confirming that the [chromium-6] outdoors entered homes at levels posing health risks, is a significant leap,” he said.

Whelton, who carried out soil testing in the L.A. fire burn scars, said he worries the paper could needlessly sow fear because so many open questions remain. He has argued for funding and establishing more comprehensive contaminant testing at the individual household level in the wake of such destructive fires — the most definitive way to know your personal risk.

“The bottom line: detecting nanoparticles in outdoor air does not mean harm occurred to 3-plus million people living and working inside buildings,” Whelton told LAist.

The average levels of chromium-6 detected in the air during debris cleanup in March were well below limits set for workplaces by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, but above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency long-term screening levels for homes, according to the study.

Still, those comparisons are imperfect because the particles measured were far smaller than what’s used for current health standards — meaning they can more easily travel throughout the body, Kleeman said.

“We don't know for sure what the concerning level should be,” he said.

Workplace standards, for example, are set for healthy adults working eight-hour shifts, “rather than for sensitive populations such as young children, pregnant individuals, older adults, or people with chronic illness,” said Jun Wu, an environmental health scientist and professor at UC Irvine’s School of Public Health, who also was not involved with the study.

More comprehensive study is needed to get at what true exposures may, or may not, have occurred, the Kleeman and outside researchers emphasized.

“This is a single, novel finding based on limited sampling, with the downwind reach estimated by modeling,” Wu said, “so broader monitoring is the natural next step.”

Where the nanoparticles may have spread

The broadest potential plume was from the Palisades Fire, spreading as far as the southern San Fernando Valley to the north and Beverly Hills and West Hollywood to the east. Kleeman said computer modeling of prevailing winds show the plume being pushed toward central L.A.

“Santa Monica, Venice and moving toward central L.A. took the brunt of the plume,” Kleeman said.

Prevailing winds didn’t spread the plume quite as far in communities near the Eaton Fire, with modeling showing northeast Pasadena being the primary community affected.

A map from the study showing the ZIP codes where a airborne chromium-6 may have spread during debris removal.

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Courtesy UCLA / UC Davis

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Many unknowns remain about the public health effects of catastrophic fires in urban areas — and how far those risks may drift beyond the burn zone.

“More work is needed to understand how widespread and persistent these particles were, how exposure varied by location and cleanup activity, and what the health risks were for nearby residents,” said Sina Hasheminassab, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the study.

Additionally, the study raises questions about how to better protect people’s health not only during, but also after destructive urban fires, said Wu.

“Much of our attention goes to the smoke during the active fire, but this study points to the cleanup and recovery phase,” she said. “This time window deserves just as much attention as the fire period itself.”

For example, some survivors whose homes survived never left during debris removal — some cited concerns about not being able to afford another place to stay without upfront insurance payouts, as well as worries about looting.

The study notes that workers in the burn zones faced the highest risk.

“Based on our field observations, many workers in the debris cleanup zone did not wear masks despite California requirements to provide approved air purifying respirators to workers,” the researchers wrote.

Crews remove wildfire debris on hillside property in Pacific Palisades last year. Researchers note in a recent study that many workers they saw weren't using respiratory protection.

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Charles Delano

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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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Survivors push for policy to protect public health after wildfires

Nicole Maccalla’s home in Altadena was damaged but ultimately survived the Eaton Fire. She and her two teenagers moved back in nearly six months after the fire, while debris removal was ongoing. Her daughter’s school nearby was also reopened just a month after the fires.

“ I know I was exposed. I know my kids were exposed,” Maccalla told LAist. “I'm not really sure what to do with that, to be honest.”

“Our entire community is really now guinea pigs,” she added. “It’s deeply concerning.”

Nicole Maccalla, with her kids, Seb and AJ. Their Altadena home survived the Eaton Fire but suffered serious smoke damage.

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Courtesy Nicole Maccalla

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Maccalla, a data scientist and member of Eaton Fire Residents United, helped guide ongoing research by scientists like Kleeman to better understand the levels of contamination after the fires.

She said this study is a warning.

“ I think in the future, we need to move a little slower in fire recovery. The goal should not be speed. The goal should be health and safety,” Maccalla said. “We rushed it, and I hope that we learn from this mistake.”

She and fellow survivors see some hope in a new bill they helped inform. AB 1642, or the Wildfire Environmental Safety and Testing Act, is making its way through the California Legislature.

The bill, written by Assemblymember John Harabedian, would establish the first statewide health standards for testing and cleaning up debris in and outside standing homes, schools, businesses and other structures after a wildfire.

Maccalla urged fellow survivors worried about the results of this study to prioritize caring for their mental and physical wellbeing.

“The stress of all of this is just going to be an added component that will be another contributor to us getting sick long term,” she said. “So many of us are still in survival mode. It's time, I think, to start taking care of ourselves a little bit.”

A year ago, the Trump administration launched a deportation campaign that would leave an indelible mark on L.A. County.

On the morning of June 6, masked federal immigration agents targeted a Home Depot in Westlake, where day laborers were gathered to solicit construction work. About 3 miles east, more masked agents descended on Ambiance Apparel, a fast-fashion warehouse in downtown Los Angeles.

At both locations, Angelenos witnessed workers getting handcuffed and hauled away. For some, those workers were friends, siblings, spouses or parents.

Purportedly meant to remove criminals from the country, federal immigration officials would go on to arrest more than 14,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area in 2025 — the majority of whom had no criminal record, according to an LAist analysis of recent data from the Deportation Data Project.

These detentions, and the ones that followed, ignited sweeping marches and community activism. Met with occasional violent resistance, the federal government deployed active-duty military personnel to the region.

So far, the mass deportation effort has left the following in its wake:

• In Ladera Heights, a food vendor clung to a tree to avoid being taken by federal agents. When they hauled her away, she was still wearing her work apron.
• In the San Fernando Valley, a high school senior took his dog for a walk and did not come home. A neighbor said she saw four men in tactical vests standing near unmarked SUVs shortly after the teenager was detained.
• In Monrovia, a 52-year-old day laborer who worked to support his wife and four daughters died after being struck by an SUV on the freeway. He was attempting to flee a raid at a local Home Depot. 

Families who were suddenly left without their breadwinners struggle to pay their rent. Asylum seekers are detained at routine check-ins. A record number of immigrants have died in civil detention. Many U.S. citizens of color now carry their passports to move about town. Federal agents have detained scores of citizens — sometimes for days. And, to date, more than 200,000 children have been separated from their parents. 

Trump’s mass deportation effort, first tested in Bakersfield, has been escalated to other cities: This includes Chicago, where federal agents killed Silverio Villegas-González, a 38-year-old single father, and almost killed Marimar Martinez, a Montessori school teaching assistant. Then, in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The federal government branded Martinez, Good and Pretti — all U.S. citizens — as “domestic terrorists” and accused them of trying to harm officers.

Eeking out a living in the raids’ aftermath

In downtown L.A.’s once-bustling fashion district, business hasn't bounced back. LAist spoke with multiple workers in the area. They declined to share their names for fear of reprisal.

Since the raid at Ambiance, “it hasn’t been the same,” said a worker at a nearby shop. She works at a party supply store specializing in piñatas and embroidered graduation stoles. She’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, she said.

“[One feels] insecure because you never know how the day is going to go,” the worker told LAist.

At Ambiance Apparel, around the block, an employee estimated a massive loss of income for the store, as much as 50%. (The store did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

That same effect has played out at small businesses all over the county. Neighborhoods that were hit hard by immigration raids — including Boyle Heights, Echo Park and Westlake, along with southeast L.A. cities like Bell, Pico Rivera and South Gate — report less customer traffic and reduced daily sales.

Angelenos, including workers' family members, gather in front of Ambiance Apparel after several employees were taken into custody by federal agents last summer.

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Genaro Molina

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Getty Images

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Since last June, the Home Depot in Westlake has been targeted for raids at least four times. Even so, day laborers still mill about the home improvement megastore’s parking lot, soliciting construction work from homeowners and contractors.

One worker, a 39-year-old from Guatemala who declined to give his name, said he witnessed the raid last year but managed to get away. He was frightened, he told LAist, but he still came back to work the next day; he has five children to support, including one studying to become a nurse.

“Ni modo, hay que comer,” he said, noting that people need money to eat. “Siempre hay necesidad.”

The reality, he said, is that he’s defenseless if agents were to show up again. Despite his own situation, he feels for the other workers around him.

“Es muy triste,” he said. “Están luchando por sus hijos, para seguir adelante” — “It’s really sad. They’re fighting for their children, to get ahead.”

Finding strength in community  

Beyond the marches last summer, Angelenos continue to find ways to support local immigrant communities. Some have offered to buy groceries for those who struggle to make ends meet or are simply scared to leave their homes. Others have volunteered to give their neighbors rides to school or work. Several regions have organized community patrols to warn about the presence of federal agents.

Activism has not eluded younger generations. At high schools and middle schools across the county, students have walked out of class in protest.

At Olive Vista Middle School in Sylmar, about 100 students left their science, English and math classes earlier this year. To critics who thought they should have stayed inside, 11-year-old Alejandro said: “They don't understand how much we love our parents.”

Across the U.S., detained immigrants themselves are engaging in activism. From Delaney Hall in New Jersey to Adelanto in California, people inside ICE detention centers have launched hunger strikes to expose conditions they describe as unsafe and inhumane. The Department of Homeland Security insists there are no hunger strikes at these facilities, and that detainees get “three meals a day, medical care, and receive full due process.”

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights has also planned a slew of L.A. events during the months of June and July to draw attention to the raids’ impact on local families — and to the unique challenges faced by certain workers, including car washers and custodians.

“A year after the cruel immigration surge that shook all Angelenos, our message is clear: Fear did not defeat us, cruelty did not divide us, and militarization did not silence us,” said executive director Angelica Salas in an email. “We remember, we resist, and we recommit ourselves to the struggle for justice, dignity and the humanity of every Angeleno.”

A Los Angeles council member and a reality star are separated by about 33,000 votes in the race for a runoff spot against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in November.

Early trends show L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman making slight gains on reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, with the latest tally released Thursday evening narrowing the gap slightly.

The Associated Press has called one runoff spot for Bass.

Votes are still being counted, and the L.A. County Registrar of Voters will receive ballots postmarked by Election Day up until seven days later. Hundreds of thousands of votes remain to be counted, according to the registrar.

Where the race stands now

By Tuesday night, Pratt had collected enough votes to put him squarely in the second spot, with a substantial lead over Raman.

But by late Wednesday, Raman had gone from just over 20% of the vote on election night to a little over 22%. Pratt gained about a tenth of a percentage point to about 30%. Thursday's release put Raman at 23.42% to Pratt's 29.35%.

“I think she has a shot at catching Pratt but I think it's a long shot,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “It requires her to get a large percentage of the votes that remain to be counted.”

Raman, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is likely to benefit from the later vote tally, Yaroslavsky said.

“The later votes tend to be more Democratic and more progressive and that inures to her benefit,” Yaroslavsky said.

[Note: Katy Yaroslavsky, his daughter-in-law, is far out in front in her reelection bid for CD5.]

Why it still may not be enough

The problem for Raman is that two days ago she was about 40,000 votes behind Pratt and last night was about 38,000 votes behind Pratt, he said.

Raman needs to gain much more than 2,000 votes a day to eclipse the 38,000 vote deficit, according to Yaroslavsky.

[The Thursday release had her gaining at a higher clip.]

“She really has to get the preponderance of the votes that will be coming in in the next week or so,” he said.

Paul Mitchell, a Democratic strategist whose company tracks ballot return data, said Republicans were reflected heavily in the early returns but as the votes continue more Democrats will be represented.

However, it may not be enough to give Raman the boost she needs. He noted that Pratt is losing votes in every vote update, but not all of those votes are going to Raman. They’re split between her and Bass.

“While [Pratt] will drop every release, I'm not sure that Raman will increase fast enough to meet and surpass him,” Mitchell said.

He explained a theory that many Bass and Raman voters held onto their ballots ahead of Election Day and that many of them were likely "establishment voters," meaning they leaned toward the incumbent.

“ So I think that in the end, we might find that [Pratt] hangs on, and the reason why he hung on is because the people who were voting at the end, the Democrats, were voting more for Karen Bass,” Mitchell said.

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.