An immunization expert is accusing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with a company called Deloitte for stealing their ideas for a follow-up to mass vaccination.
A cessation and withdrawal letter August obtained by the New York Times shows that Tiffany Tate, creator of PrepMod Vaccination Tracking, is seeking $ 15 million after believing that CDC and Deloitte took the ideas from their vaccination tracker and implemented them on their own. vaccine management system (VAMS). )
The letter explains the events that led to Deloitte and the CDC agreement and states that they obtained details of Tate’s work and then implemented similar functions 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 has spent his career helping vaccinate minorities, he said the Times that was “in a state of shock, and I really had a broken heart because I worked with these people all my career and I respected and trusted them ”.
Deloitte told the New York Times that the allegations are not “unfounded.”
“[VAMS is a] Salesforce based scalable application 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 began. At a meeting in March, Tate agreed to allow the CDC to see details about PrepMod, according to the letter.
After presenting his system to the CDC and Deloitte in April, Tate alleges that the director of CDC immunization information systems asked about the cost of the system and wanted to meet with Tate’s technical team. .
In May, CDC and Deloitte received details about Tate’s system and the CDC admitted it was not prepared to take on the distribution of vaccinations with its current system, the letter states. Later, the CDC introduced VAMS, which Tate says has a structure similar to PrepMod.
Later in May, when a new feature was added to PrepMod, VAMS allegedly added a similar feature shortly after.
At the end of the month, the CDC offered Deloitte a $ 15.8 million contract “essentially to play PrepMod,” according to the letter. The offer was $ 5 million more than Tate asked for for his system.
Tate’s original plan was to license his system to the CDC so that states could receive it for free, but he ended up selling it to the states directly after the CDC partnered with Deloitte, The New York Times reported.
PrepMod is used in 27 states, while VAMS is only used in 10 states.
Cessation and withdrawal call for the cessation of any evolution of the VAMS system and the cancellation of all demonstrations of the system.
The Hill has contacted CDC and Deloitte to comment.