Born: Unknown, United States (assumed)
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tiffany Tate had created a vaccination tracker called PrepMod, used by public health departments across the U.S. for flu and other mass vaccinations. During the pandemic, dozens of states began using the app to track COVID-19 vaccinations. In 2021, Tate sued the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the multinational corporation Deloitte for copying her app for their Vaccine Administration Management System (VAMS). Tate accused Deloitte and the CDC of using details of her work and implementing similar features, and that Deloitte tried to hire Tate in June 2020 to help develop VAMS. She told The New York Times that she was “in shock, and I really was heartbroken because I’ve worked with these people my entire career and I respected them and I trusted them.” Tate claims that she had several meetings with the CDC starting in March 2020, sharing significant amounts of information about her system. Tate says the CDC asked to speak with her technical team and asked for a quote but did not follow through. When a new feature was added to PrepMod that May, a similar feature was added to VAMS soon after, Tate said. That month, the CDC reportedly offered Deloitte a $15.8 million contract “essentially to reproduce PrepMod,” as Tate put it—half a million more than Tate had quoted to use PrepMod.