RFK Jr. just announced that HHS is launching one of the biggest marketing campaigns in its history. The goal, as he has stated, is to get every American wearing a device that constantly monitors your biological data. We're talking about a half-billion dollar PR campaign using your tax money to convince you to voluntarily hand over the most intimate data about your body, only to then file it under “consumer data”.
The amount of funding that has flooded biotech wearables markets over the last month is insane. But before we dive into the billions being spent to surveil you, let's talk about what biotechnology actually is and why this matters.
What Are Biotech Wearables?
Biotechnology uses living systems like DNA and proteins to solve problems. Instead of making drugs in chemical factories, you program bacteria to produce them. Biotech wearables are the consumer-facing version of this; devices that use biological monitoring to track everything your body does throughout the day.
We're not talking about your grandma's Fitbit. These devices track heart rate variability, stress hormones, blood sugar levels, sleep patterns… basically everything your body does to regulate itself throughout the day.
It’s important to note that the technology itself can genuinely save lives. These devices are incredibly clever and can detect heart problems before you feel symptoms, help diabetics manage their conditions, catch sleep disorders that would go undiagnosed for years. Which sounds amazing, right? Technology helping people get healthier, the American Dream™.
But the dream starts turning into a nightmare when you dig into who's actually building the infrastructure and where the money's coming from.
HR1: The Bait and Switch
Let's start with the money, because that's where the contradictions become impossible to ignore. While Kennedy talks about empowering Americans through wearables, HHS just redirected $500 million from COVID-19 vaccine research to a single influenza vaccine project, bypassing the usual scientific review processes (a.k.a. the kind of massive funding shift that happens when political priorities override scientific ones).
Meanwhile, the administration's 2026 budget proposal slashes NIH funding by nearly 40% (from $48 billion to $27.5 billion) while consolidating 27 institutes into just eight. The CDC lost half its budget, the FDA was cut by 40%, and over 20,000 healthcare workers were either fired or forced into retirement.
Source: Dollars are in nominal budget authority. See NIH’s Congressional Justification for the FY 2026 budget.
But here's where it gets interesting. While traditional healthcare infrastructure is being systematically defunded, there's been a massive influx of investment in what they're calling "consumer-facing technology" and "remote monitoring tools." States wanting access to the $50 billion earmarked for "rural health transformation" must provide these technologies as the majority of their spending.
Translation: no hospitals, no ambulances, no doctors. If states want federal health money, they have to prioritize wearables and remote monitoring over direct care.
It's a classic bait-and-switch. Take away $155 billion in traditional healthcare, then offer back $50 billion in surveillance technology and call it an upgrade. That's like taking an entire pizza away from someone and giving them back one pepperoni that watches you sleep at night.
Who's Building the Infrastructure?
The companies building this "healthcare" infrastructure aren't exactly new to the game. Take Oracle, which recently acquired Cerner for $28 billion, giving them control over an enormous portion of American medical data. What most people don't know is that Oracle literally started as a CIA project—the company takes its name from the CIA operation that founder Larry Ellison worked on in the 1970s, and the CIA was Oracle's first customer.
Oracle's track record with healthcare data is genuinely terrifying. In January 2025, hackers breached Oracle's health servers and stole patient data including names, Social Security numbers, and full medical histories. Oracle didn't discover the breach for nearly a month, and when healthcare companies reported the compromise, Oracle initially denied it happened. Patients had to wait 90 days before they could take action to protect their stolen Social Security and private medical data, affecting over 410,000 people.
Copy of Oracle email notice (BleepingComputer)
And remember, that was data protected by HIPAA. The wearable data we're talking about now isn't protected at all. When you use a consumer device, all that biological data is considered consumer data, subject only to terms of service that companies write themselves and can change at will. Apple's privacy policy already states clearly that they can share your health data for "national security or law enforcement purposes."
A Tale of Two Companies
To understand where this is heading, you need to know about two companies whose histories intertwine in disturbing ways. Both were born from CIA funding. Both cut their teeth on surveillance technology. Both now position themselves as essential partners in America's health future.
The first is Oracle, which most people know as a boring database company. What fewer people know is that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project; the same project that provided the company its first contract and its foundational technology. Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder (and my arch nemesis), has spent decades building what he calls "the single greatest tool we Americans could have to make life tougher for terrorists" — a comprehensive national database that combines government records with private data to track individual behavior patterns.
Oracle proved this concept in Chicago during the 2012 NATO protests. Using software called Endeca, Chicago police monitored over 20,000 tweets per hour, automatically flagging posts that contained words like "protest" or expressed "negative sentiment." The system combined social media posts with 911 calls, arrest records, and real-time police deployment data to predict where demonstrations might turn problematic. Oracle was so proud of this work that they used it as a case study to sell the same surveillance tools to Chinese authorities.
Construct a Public Security Data Analysis Engine Using an Oracle Big Data Solution 2018
I wish I were kidding. In fact, I’m so serious that I will link the entire pitch deck here for you to peruse. Oracle literally packaged their Chicago protest monitoring system as a sales deck for the Chinese government, helping to build the infrastructure that now powers China's social credit system—the system that uses biological data like heart rate and sleep patterns to determine whether citizens can buy train tickets or enroll their children in good schools.
The second company is Palantir, named after the all-seeing stones in Lord of the Rings. Like Oracle, Palantir was founded with CIA money to solve the problem of connecting dots across massive datasets. Where Oracle stores the data, Palantir finds the patterns that connect each data particle: predicting behavior, identifying anomalies, flagging individuals whose biological or digital signatures suggest they might be worth monitoring more closely.
So you can see why the overlap of healthcare and surveillance companies have me understandably nervous.
The Feedback Loop
Here's what makes biological surveillance different from other forms of monitoring: your body doesn't lie, and it can't be turned off. When authorities tracked protesters' tweets in Chicago, people could delete their posts or abandon their accounts. When your heart rate spikes because you're reading about government overreach, or when your sleep patterns change because you're worried about your job security, there's no hiding that data if you've agreed to share it.
Oracle's recent security breaches offer a preview of how this plays out in practice. In January 2025, hackers accessed Oracle's healthcare servers and stole comprehensive medical records for over 400,000 Americans. The breach went undetected for weeks. When healthcare companies reported the compromise, Oracle initially denied it happened. Patients waited three months before learning their Social Security numbers and complete medical histories had been stolen.
That was data protected by HIPAA, America's healthcare privacy law. The biological data flowing from consumer wearables enjoys no such protection. When you wear a fitness tracker or smartwatch, everything it records becomes "consumer data" governed only by terms of service that companies can change at will.
Insurance companies are already capitalizing on this distinction. John Hancock now offers policies where your premiums are partly based on data from your fitness tracker. They call it "behavioral underwriting"— you get discounts for sharing your data, but you pay penalties for keeping your biology private. Employers are implementing "voluntary" wellness programs where sharing your biological data can save you hundreds of dollars per year on health insurance.
When privacy costs money and surveillance offers discounts, how voluntary is the choice really?
The COVID Laboratory
The COVID-19 pandemic served as an unintentional beta test for population-scale health monitoring. For the first time in American history, people voluntarily shared intimate biological data with apps, employers, and airlines in the name of public safety. Contact tracing apps recorded not just where you went, but how long you stayed, who you were near, even how you moved through spaces.
People complied because the ask was framed as temporary and morally necessary. If you don't share your location data, you might inadvertently spread disease to vulnerable people. If you don't upload your vaccination status, you can't participate in normal social life. The surveillance was positioned as civic duty.
But temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent. In Singapore, health data collected for contact tracing was quickly repurposed for criminal investigations. In Israel, location data from COVID apps was used to monitor political dissidents. In the United States, employers who implemented health screening for COVID continued those programs long after the pandemic, often expanding them to include mental health monitoring and productivity tracking.
The infrastructure built for emergency health response doesn't disappear when the emergency ends. It evolves, finding new justifications and applications.
What the Data Reveals
Companies like Palantir are already using biological data to predict behavior in ways that extend far beyond health. Heart rate variability patterns can indicate whether someone is likely to quit their job, become politically active, or experience a mental health crisis. Sleep disruption combined with location data can suggest relationship problems, financial stress, or growing dissatisfaction with current circumstances.
It’s happening now in corporate wellness programs and employee monitoring systems. The logical next step is using this data to predict and potentially prevent behaviors that authorities might consider problematic: organizing protests, spreading "misinformation," or simply expressing dissent in ways that correlate with certain biological signatures.
So the technology for this already exists, and what's being built now is the social and economic infrastructure to make it universal.
In Conclusion…
The story we're being told is about personal empowerment; taking control of your health, making informed decisions about your body, using technology to optimize your wellbeing. And for many people, in many circumstances, wearable health technology does exactly that. The story isn't wrong, but it's incomplete.
The complete story includes the companies building this infrastructure, their track record with surveillance technology, and the economic incentives that make comprehensive biological monitoring profitable regardless of its health benefits. It includes the gradual erosion of healthcare alternatives that makes participating feel voluntary even when it's practically mandatory.
Most importantly, it includes the question of what happens next. Once the infrastructure for real-time biological monitoring exists at population scale, what prevents it from being used for purposes its creators never intended or its users never agreed to?
We still get to choose which future we build. But that choice window won't stay open forever.
Sources and Further Reading
Government Documents and Budget Analysis:
RFK Jr. and Wearables Campaign:
Oracle Surveillance Infrastructure:
Privacy and Data Protection Issues:
Economic Coercion and Insurance:
