An immunization expert is accusing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with a company called Deloitte, for stealing his ideas for a mass vaccination tracker.
A cease-and-desist Letter of August obtained by The New York Times shows Tiffany Tate, creator of the vaccination tracker PrepMod, is asking for $ 15 million in damages after she believes the CDC and Deloitte took the ideas from their vaccination tracker and implemented them on their own Vaccine Administration Management System (VAMS)
The letter describes the events that led to Deloitte and the CDC agreement and states that they obtained details of Tate’s work and implemented similar features in their own system.
Deloitte even tried to hire Tate in June to help develop the system she claims to already have with PrepMod.
Tate, who spent his career helping to vaccinate minorities, said the Times that she was “in a state of shock, and I was really heartbroken because I worked with these people throughout my career and respected and trusted them ”.
Deloitte told The New York Times that the allegations are “unfounded”.
“[VAMS is a] scalable Salesforce-based application designed for CDC requirements and not based on [Tate’s ideas]”said spokesman Jonathan Gandel.
Tate started talking to the CDC in March last year, when the pandemic started. 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 CDC and Deloitte in April, Tate claims 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, CDC and Deloitte received details about Tate’s system with the CDC admitting that it was not prepared to take on the distribution of vaccines with its current system, the letter said. The CDC later revealed 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 afterwards.
At the end of the month, CDC offered Deloitte a $ 15.8 million contract “essentially to reproduce the PrepMod”, according to the letter. The offer was $ 0.5 million more than Tate asked for his system.
Tate’s original plan was to license his 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 York Times reported.
PrepMod is being used in 27 states, while VAMS is being used only in 10 states.
Cease-and-desist requires suspending any development of the VAMS system and canceling all system statements.
The Hill contacted CDC and Deloitte for comment.