Pittsburgh Company Who Received Lucrative Contract To Report COVID Cases Instead Of The CDC Reportedly Showing Irregularities In Their Process

You have GOT to be kidding me!


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As a continued result of his botched response to the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump has attempted to cover his own behind by delegitimizing and essentially firing every person and entity that doesn’t fit his skewed narrative of the pandemic that’s now killed over 150,000 people in the United States alone.

One of those entities to recently find themselves on the receiving end of Donald’s chopping ax was none other than the Center for Disease Control.

Recently, Donald Trump decided that the CDC would no longer be receiving COVID-19 data to build a database on the virus, and instead award the contract to a Pittsburgh company, TeleTracking Technologies.

However, an investigation into the contract award conducted by NPR has unsurprisingly found multiple irregularities in the process through which Donald Trump’s administration chose the Pittsburgh company for the multi-million dollar contract to collect COVID-19 data from hospitals all across the country.

Traditionally speaking, TeleTracking Technologies’ focus has surrounded the creation of software that allows hospitals to keep track of patient status. Naturally, it’s rather questionable as to how the company was suddenly able to land a multi-million dollar contract to gather data in the throes of a massive pandemic.

The findings of the NPR investigation are as follows:

  • The Department of Health and Human Services initially characterized the contract with TeleTracking as a no-bid contract. When asked about that, HHS said there was a “coding error” and that the contract was actually competitively bid.
  • The process by which HHS awarded the contract is normally used for innovative scientific research, not the building of government databases.
  • HHS had directly phoned the company about the contract, according to a company spokesperson.
  • TeleTracking CEO Michael Zamagias had links to the New York real estate world — and in particular, a firm that financed billions of dollars in projects with the Trump Organization.

The NPR report goes on to outline the various troubles hospitals have experienced with the abrupt change while knee-deep in the middle of a pandemic, including the fact that hospitals were given only a day to make the transition and the fact that the software is eating up precious time by requiring staff to manually enter all the information.

But perhaps the worst — yet most unsurprising — information to come from the investigation was the ties that TeleTracking Technologies has with the Trump organization.

This is shaping up to be just like any other shady Trump business deal, in which Donald Trump does whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is benefiting from the situation. And clearly, a deadly pandemic is no exception to that rule.

You can read the full report from NPR here.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/The White House

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