CDC further expands use of Palantir’s Tiberius platform
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will expand use of its Tiberius platform from COVID-19 vaccine distribution to therapeutics distribution and supply chain resiliency, through a $5.3 million contract with Palantir announced Tuesday.
The six-month contract allows CDC to integrate additional datasets leveraging the modular software platform to improve decision making and operations in other COVID-19 treatment areas.
Powered by Palantir Foundry, Tiberius became the backbone of the CDC’s day-to-day vaccine dosage program, after being selected in mid-2020 as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. The agency renewed and expanded its contract with Palantir for the technology in July, and is doing so again.
Palantir Foundry is a software-as-a-service product designed to allow government agencies to connect siloed datasets and conduct granular data analysis.
“A successful federal response to COVID requires real-time situational awareness to manage rapidly changing epidemiology,” said Dr. Bill Kassler, chief medical officer for U.S. government at Palantir, in the announcement. “Palantir’s technology provides public health officials, from the federal to the local levels, with the tools they need to make informed, up-to-date decisions about sending medications and other resources where they are needed most.”
Tiberius helps users, which reached between about 2,000 and 3,000 as of July, make decisions about domestic and international vaccine distribution as new COVID-19 variants emerge.
The CDC has a long history of contracting for Palantir technologies helping counter Ebola, surveil food-borne illnesses, and manage anthrax and bacterial special pathogens. The agency also renewed and expanded a contract with Palantir in June allowing it to extend a non-COVID-19 disease surveillance solution to any of its centers.
Earlier this month, in a letter to Shareholders, CEO Alex Karp noted that Silicon Valley companies selling data products to federal agencies face complex moral questions, and that there “are no goods or services or government today without software.”
Palantir reported total government revenue of $218 million for the third quarter of 2021, compared with total revenue of $174 million for commercial contracts.
