The New Dark Age

Sunday, 22 June 2025 — medConfidential

If your baby is born with a rare disease today, or might have one of those rare diseases, the NHS can and will already DNA sequence them to help figure out what’s wrong. When Wes Streeting “announces” every baby should have their DNA sequenced at birth, that’s not a new revelation in a gift to the Telegraph (chosen because of his leadership ambitions; here’s a free to read version or BBC).

What is new is that Government wants to sequence every newborn, all the kids who aren’t sick, because it ‘might be useful’. It’s definitely good for those who sell sequencing machines; it’s good for Palantir and Amazon who will be processing all this data, and it’s the preclude to the 10 year plan for the NHS which will move money from your human GP to prioritise AI chatbots that will always demand ever more data.

Our friends at Genewatch UK have detailed resources on the sequencing process and the long history of this proposal, and we have some of the future consequences for your medical records at medConfidential.org.