Irregularities In COVID Reporting Contract Award Process Raises New Questions
By Dina Temple-Raston & Tim Mak,
NPR
| 07. 29. 2020
An NPR investigation has found irregularities in the process by which the Trump administration awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a Pittsburgh company to collect key data about COVID-19 from the country's hospitals.
The contract is at the center of a controversy over the administration's decision to move that data reporting function from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which has tracked infection information for a range of illnesses for years — to the Department of Health and Human Services.
TeleTracking Technologies, the company that won the contract, has traditionally focused on creating software for hospitals to track patient status. And there are questions about how it came to be responsible for gathering data in the midst of a pandemic.
Among the findings of the NPR investigation:
- 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...
Related Articles
By Lucy Tu, The Atlantic | 07.11.2025
Donald Trump—who is, by his own accounting, “the fertilization president” and “the father of IVF”—wants to help Americans reproduce. During his 2024 campaign, he promised that the government or insurance companies would cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. In...
By Jared Whitlock, Endpoints News | 07.15.2025
Patient groups face a harder and unpredictable path going state-by-state to boost screening for rare but treatable conditions after the Trump administration disbanded a federal advisory committee on newborn screening.
In April, the Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns...
By Ben Fidler and Ned Pagliarulo, Biopharma Dive | 07.21.2025
One month ago, a 51-year-old man treated in a clinical trial with an experimental gene therapy became dangerously sick. The developer of that treatment, Sarepta Therapeutics, informed the Food and Drug Administration his case could be life-threatening.
The man died...
By Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio | 06.27.2025
PAT DUGGINS-- If I were to say, ‘man, have you seen the price of eggs these days?’ You're probably thinking, Oh, he's talking about inflation and the price of groceries and how it became an issue in the presidential race...