I’ve been asking the government questions about its COVID-19 data deals for weeks. But there was one particular question I thought they might be happy to answer: what are the success stories? Have we got anything from these contracts with tech giants like artificial intelligence firms Palantir and Faculty? After all, their skill in “delivering at pace in this time of crisis” was what had justified Dominic Cummings in summoning them to Downing Street in mid-March.
In response, I was pointed to the Faculty ‘dashboard’ – just at the point when the public health world was crying foul because this dashboard didn’t contain any data on community infections, so was missing outbreaks like the one in Leicester.
If the dashboard is the only thing we’re getting from the biggest transfer of our NHS data to the private sector in history, it’s pretty unimpressive. And it left me wondering, who else is getting what?
