An immunization expert accuses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with a company called Deloitte, of stealing ideas to track mass vaccination.
A cessation and renunciation letter August issue of The New York Times shows that Tiffany Tate, the creator of vaccination tracker PrepMod, is seeking $ 15 million in damages after he believes CDC and Deloitte took ideas from his vaccination tracker and implemented them in their own system. Administration of Vaccines (VAMS)
The letter outlines the events that led to the conclusion of the Deloitte and CDC agreement and claims that they obtained details about Tate’s work and then implemented similar features in their own system.
Deloitte even tried to hire Tate in June to help develop the system it claims it already has with PrepMod.
Tate, who spent his career helping to vaccinate minorities, said Times that it was “in a shock and I was really heartbroken, because I worked with these people my whole career and I respected and trusted them. ”
Deloitte told The New York Times that the allegations were “unfounded.”
“[VAMS is a] scalable application, based on Salesforce, designed according to CDC requirements and not based on [Tate’s ideas]”said spokesman Jonathan Gandel.
Tate began talking to the CDC in March last year, when the pandemic first began. At a March meeting, Tate agreed to allow the CDC to see details about PrepMod, according to the letter.
After introducing his CDC and Deloitte system in April, Tate claims that the director of CDC’s 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 about the Tate system, with the CDC acknowledging that it was not prepared to take on the distribution of vaccination with its current system, the letter said. The CDC later revealed VAMS, which Tate says has a structure similar to PrepMod.
Later in May, when a new feature was added to PrepMod, VAMS would have added a similar feature shortly thereafter.
At the end of the month, the CDC offered Deloitte a $ 15.8 million contract “essentially to reproduce PrepMod,” according to the letter. The offer was $ 0.5 million more than Tate asked for.
Tate’s initial plan was to license his system to the CDC so that states could receive it for free, but ended up selling it to states directly after the CDC collaborated with Deloitte, The New York Times reported.
PrepMod is used in 27 states, while VAMS is only used in 10 states.
The termination and withdrawal requires the cessation of any evolution of the VAMS system and the cancellation of all demonstrations of the system.
Hill contacted the CDC and Deloitte for comments.