Two things:

Citation needed (sorry).

It should be noted that the NHS is one of the largest, longest, most standardised medical record sets in the world. This is because it's for the whole (67m person) country, and because the NHS is so old records are old and centralised to a degree you don't see in private-healthcare, federal or smaller countries. That makes this of interest imho.

The NHS DBs have been used for really good medical research in the past (exactly because of the reasons above). That's fine. Buts it's different to just sharing the data with anyone...

Because most countries don't run a national healthcare system; this is data collection by the state (not a private company) and should be treated accordingly.

But then again, the State is part of the Five Eyes, so there’s not much to expect in terms of privacy anyway.