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appalachiablue

(41,052 posts)
Fri Jul 31, 2020, 03:29 PM Jul 2020

'There Are Very Good Reasons To Doubt Information From Trump's New COVID-19 Database'

"There are very good reasons to doubt information from Trump's new COVID-19 database.' By Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, July 31, 2020.

Until a very short time ago, hospitals across the nation had a single place to send their data on test results, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19—the National Healthcare Safety Network. That database, controlled by the Centers of Disease Control, fed into dashboards and data sources that were visible to the public and available for analysis by researchers.

But that abruptly changed in the second week of July when hospitals were told to change both the way they encoded their information, and the location where it was sent. Rather than the CDC, the data would go to a new location controlled by the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC was completely bypassed. For some days, their dashboards were not updated at all, and even now some of the data that used to be available is missing.

Immediately, state officials complained that they could not see the information from hospitals in their own states. Meanwhile, Donald Trump threatened to send the National Guard to hospitals to see that they “did it right.” Suspicions about the new database grew when it became clear that the data wasn’t really going to the HHS, but to a private tech company which partnered another tech headed by a Republican mega-donor. And suspicions grew again when the miraculous news came down that the switchover in databases coincided exactly with a supposed slowdown in the rate of new cases. And now a new investigation shows that … it’s even worse than it seemed.

The company directly behind the new HHS Protect Now database is called TeleTracking Technologies. The CEO of that company, Michael Zamagias, has direct links with not just New York real estate projects in general, but with billions of dollars of projects with the Trump Organization. To build the new database, TeleTracking turned to data-mining firm Palantir. That company is owned by billionaire Republican donor, Facebook investor, and would-be vampire Peter Thiel. Palantir was also behind “profiling tools” used by ICE to select targets...

More, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/31/1965382/-Changing-COVID-19-data-collection-from-CDC-to-private-company-was-every-bit-as-corrupt-as-it-seemed
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- Also: NPR, 'Irregularities In COVID Reporting Contract Award Process Raises New Questions,' July 29, 2020.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/29/896645314/irregularities-in-covid-reporting-contract-award-process-raises-new-questions

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