Some also have raised questions about Palantir’s connections to the Trump administration. Peter Thiel is one of the co-founders and major shareholders of the company. The New York Times reported that Thiel contributed $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s re-election effort through secretive super PAC and other funds.
Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., said the Trump administration often assumed it could undo bad management with new technology “by calling up some big Trump donor who owns a software company that will magically fix the problem.”
To others watching the chaotic first weeks of the vaccine’s rollout, the mismanagement of its distribution was a failure of leadership within the Trump administration.
“They literally thought their job stopped with vaccine development,” said Niall Brennan, CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute and former chief data officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “No, your job stops when the American population is vaccinated. It’s a massive abdication of job responsibility.”
Foster said a better approach would be relying on those with real expertise and building on systems that already existed.
Foster pointed to the annual flu vaccination effort, in which every state has a plan and system in place with the CDC through a vaccine ordering and tracking system called VTrckS, with distribution by the health care company McKesson. For the 2019-20 flu season, more than 170 million flu vaccine doses were distributed to states.
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