Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned health experts after accidentally revealing the existence of a “biosurveillance” program within his agency.
“I literally wondered what he was talking about,” said Gigi Gronvall, who’s written extensively about synthetic biology as a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was speaking with NOTUS in a report published Monday.
Last week, RFK Jr. penned an op-ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal about his efforts to ‘restore public trust’ in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which operates within the HHS. In the op-ed, he made mention of the “Biothreat Radar Detection System,” which he described as an “advanced early-detection tool” that can spot pathogens circulating in communities early.
The only issue? The program, at least on paper, does not exist.
In an email dated Aug. 28 and obtained by NOTUS, RFK Jr. wrote that his agency would “soon launch the Biothreat Radar Detection System.” Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told NOTUS that the program would “combine new technological capability with automated result interpretation by artificial intelligence systems,” a descriptor that has raised cause for concern among some health experts.
“There’s peril involved in that,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, who leads the Brown University School of Public Health’s Pandemic Center as its director, speaking with NOTUS. “It used to be that you couldn’t immigrate to the United States if you had HIV. Those rules were changed about 10 years ago, but you could imagine the same kind of tendencies that created that rule in the first place being misapplied.”
Beyond fears that the program could lead to a resurgence of policies discriminatory toward immigrants with certain health conditions, some of the health experts worried that such a program wouldn’t even spit out accurate data given the Trump administration’s significant cuts to public health and foreign aid spending.
“AI can only give you an accurate analysis if you put real data into it to analyze,” Gronvall said. “The drastic cuts in actual surveillance that will affect all levels – international, states, local – will leave AI with nothing but hallucinations.”