This is a duplication off efforts begun by the CDC decades ago. The fear during the cold war was that the Soviet Union or China would attack using biological weapons and the government would not be fast enough to respond. The objective was to identify a threat using death certificates.
There’s a really great book titled “The Ghost Map” about using death notices and statistical analysis to pin down the source of the 1850s cholera epidemic in London.
I don’t have that big of a problem with this; social media trends analysis could provide a big advantage to nipping what would otherwise be a nasty epidemic or even pandemic in the bud. And something like the 1918 Spanish Flu WILL hit us again ...
I DO have a problem with this being done by the EPA. It should be the CDC, esp if the CDC already has such an effort underway. The only way I see this being something for EPA is if they’re using it as an obscured way of aligning health reactions to something environmental. Like pollution hot spots. Such as tracking impacts of that bad OH River chem spill a couple weeks back. But they should just come out and say so and be forced to make their case ...