Vaccination expert accuses CDC of stealing idea of ​​COVID-19 tracking



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A vaccination expert accuses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a company called Deloitte of stealing his ideas for a mass vaccination tracker.

A cease-and-desist letter from August obtained by The New York Times shows Tiffany Tate, creator of the vaccine tracker PrepMod, is seeking $ 15 million in damages after she believes the CDC and Deloitte took her tracker’s ideas to vaccination and implemented them in their own vaccine administration management system (VAMS)

The letter describes the events leading up to Deloitte and the CDC agreement and claims that they obtained details of Tate’s work and then implemented similar functionality in their own system.

Deloitte even tried hiring Tate in June to help develop the system she claims to already have with PrepMod.

Tate, who has spent his career vaccinating minorities, Told the Times she was “in shock, and I was really heartbroken because I have worked with these people my whole career and I respected and trusted them.

Deloitte told the New York Times the claims were “baseless.”

“[VAMS is a] scalable application based on Salesforce, designed according to CDC requirements and not based on [Tate’s ideas]Said spokesperson Jonathan Gandel.

Tate began speaking with the CDC in March of last year when the pandemic began. At a meeting in March, Tate agreed to allow the CDC to see details on PrepMod, according to the letter.

After presenting his system to the CDC and Deloitte in April, Tate alleges that the CDC’s director of immunization information systems asked about the cost of the system and wanted to meet with Tate’s technical team.

In May, the CDC and Deloitte received details of Tate’s system, with the CDC admitting it was not ready to take over vaccine distribution with its current system, the letter said. The CDC then unveiled VAMS, which Tate says has a similar structure to PrepMod.

Later in May, when a new feature was added to PrepMod, VAMS reportedly added a similar feature shortly thereafter.

At the end of the month, CDC offered Deloitte a $ 15.8 million contract “essentially to replicate PrepMod,” according to the letter. The offer was $ 0.5 million more than Tate had requested for its system.

Tate’s original plan was to license her system to the CDC so that states could receive it for free, but she ended up selling it to states directly after the CDC partnered with Deloitte, the New reported. York Times.

PrepMod is used in 27 states while VAMS is only used in 10 states.

The Cease-and-Desist requires the cessation of all development of the VAMS system and the cancellation of all demonstrations of the system.

The Hill has reached out to the CDC and Deloitte for comment.



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