Walgreens Stocks – Vaccines Are Free at CVS and Walgreens. You’re What’s for Sale.

It’s not as if businesses aren’t expected to sell to potential customers—that’s the whole point. But the crass commercial underpinnings of America’s vaccine distribution reflect a country in which every public good has either been privatized or relegated to the military, seemingly one of the last competent—and well-resourced—institutions in American life. Rather than a functioning universal health care system that brings vaccines to people in their homes, we have a patchwork, ranging from concierge health care allegedly sneaking wealthy clients to the front of the line to difficult-to-navigate public systems that have so far failed to address equity in distribution at scale. In general, people are left to fend for themselves. That makes them easy prey for companies that wish to monetize their vaccination experience.

In leveraging a public crisis for private gain, some companies have distinguished themselves. Palantir, the secretive data-crunching company co-founded by Peter Thiel, has earned millions in government contracts to provide software that, according to various reports, hardly works at all. Buoyed by Thiel’s relationship with former President Trump, Palantir has become one of the government’s go-to sources for pandemic data-processing tools. (Thiel is unlikely to have such a chummy relationship with President Biden, but Palantir, which was funded partly by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, already benefits from commercial relationships with various intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense.)

Announced in October as part of the comically named Operation Warp Speed, Palantir’s Tiberius software was supposed to help state and municipal officials track and manage vaccine distribution. (Like Warp Speed, Tiberius is a Star Trek reference: It’s the middle name of Captain James T. Kirk.) Like a program Palantir provided for the Department of Health and Human Services, Tiberius would be a privacy-friendly effort, with no personal health data collected, officials said. Instead, the software would work off broader anonymized data, such as demographic and employment information. Overall, the program touted access to 187 different data sets, according to HHS. Information about numbers of cases, hospital capacity, and available inventory could be used to target vaccines appropriately. Keen algorithmic decision-making would help tackle supply-chain bottlenecks as they appear.