Palantir’s COVID-19 Vaccine Tracking Tool Is Now Being Used for Monkeypox

• Human Health Services uses Palantir’s Tiberius, for managing COVID-19 vaccine purchases, and transfers, and to track if vulnerable populations are getting vaccinated.
• Some state health departments have reported that for monitoring vaccinations among vulnerable groups, they preferred their in-house tools to Tiberius. 
• Recently, Tiberius introduced features to manage monkeypox vaccine purchases and transfers.

Some states are now using Tiberius — a custom tool developed by Palantir for managing the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine — for tracking the allocation of monkeypox vaccines, Insider has learned.

The state health departments of Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina told Insider that they are using Tiberius in their response to the monkeypox outbreak. Palantir confirmed to Insider that Tiberius started supporting monkeypox data in late July.

Palantir — which sells decision-making software for entities working with big data — introducing monkeypox resources into Tiberius is the start of the company expanding use of the tool beyond COVID-19 vaccinations to aid in public health management on a longer-term basis.

A Palantir spokesperson told Insider that the company isn’t currently working on configuring Tiberius for any additional public health responses, but said the company is “supportive” of new areas of use.

The US has struggled to respond to this year’s outbreak of monkeypox, a viral infection that causes rashes and welts. The monkeypox vaccine distribution features in Tiberius launched about a month after estimated case counts started to climb, and the Biden administration began rushing vaccines to hotspots. 

There are currently more than 18,000 cases in the country, and the CDC says that many of the cases have occurred among men who have sex with men. Many gay and bisexual men in urban hotspots — including New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Pittsburg — have reported struggling to book a vaccination appointment in recent weeks due to the high demand for vaccines and low availability of doses. About 350,000 Americans have been vaccinated for monkeypox as of September.

A Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told Insider that the department is currently using Tiberius to track “the total number of [monkeypox vaccine] vials allocated and ordered.” The spokesperson added that the department is also using its own state immunization registry “to track administrations and inventory” of the vaccine.

States aren’t required to use Tiberius to manage their monkeypox vaccine allocations; rather, it’s available upon request. A spokesperson for the Oklahoma State Department of Health said that the department started using Tiberius’s monkeypox features on August 2, a day after it was able to request access. 

Several state health departments including Arizona, California, Idaho, and Oregon told Insider that they aren’t using Tiberius in their monkeypox response.

An Oregon Health Authority spokesperson told Insider that they believed the monkeypox features on Tiberius were “still under development,” however, the Palantir spokesperson said that the monkeypox features on Tiberius were fully operational. 

The company said that Tiberius’s monkeypox features were adapted from its COVID-19 tools.

“This is the exact same infrastructure that was used for COVID 19, vaccines, therapeutics and test kits,” the Palantir spokesperson said. “The same foundation was configured to meet the need for monkeypox.”

US states are currently required to use HHS’s Health Provider Ordering Portal (HPOP) for ordering monkeypox vaccines. It’s unclear if states will eventually be required to use Tiberius to track how many monkeypox vaccines they have and how many they need. States are currently required to use Tiberius to report COVID-19 vaccine orders and allocation.

Some states have reported frustrations with Tiberius during the COVID-19 pandemic. Insider obtained documents via public record request that show Tiberius has launched several “microplanning tools” — designed to track whether at-risk populations were getting COVID-19 vaccines. However, 9 state health departments told Insider that they use their own microplanning tools rather than Tiberius’s. USA Today has also reported that many states don’t find Tiberius’s microplanning tools useful.

HHS originally awarded $16 million to Palantir in 2020 to help the federal government manage the distribution and transfer of COVID-19 vaccines, needles, and syringes. Although Tiberius was introduced under Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s project for developing and distributing the COVID-19 vaccine, HHS has continued using Tiberius under the Biden administration. Palantir won an additional $31 million for continued work on Tiberius last July, and another $15 million this year.

Are you a current or former Palantir employee or public health worker? Know something we missed? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or [email protected], or through secure messaging app Signal at +1 (785) 813-1084. Check out Insider’s source guide for suggestions on how to share information securely.