The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution
Another co-founder and co-CEO of Healthy Together and Twenty, Diesel Peltz, boasts interesting ties to the incoming Trump administration via his father, billionaire and chairman emeritus of the Wendy’s Company, Nelson Peltz. Nelson Peltz claims responsibility for re-connecting Elon Musk and Trump, which led to Musk financially and very publicly back the 2024 Trump campaign. Since the election, Musk’s outsized role in setting incoming government policy has become both obvious and controversial. Variety reported the following about the Peltz family role in uniting Musk with Trump:
“[Peltz] said Musk, together with Peltz’s son Diesel…‘had a breakfast at the house, we invited Donald for breakfast, and they [Musk and Trump] sort of reunited again… I hope it’s good, you know. I was a matchmaker.’” (emphasis added)
Importantly, both Thiel and Musk played critical roles in successfully lobbying for the appointment of Thiel protege JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Now, Musk is set to head Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory group, along with the founder of the biotech company Roivant (which has created subsidiary biotech companies with Pfizer, and has invested deeply in mRNA technology), Vivek Ramaswamy, to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
The meeting between the two Peltz men, Musk and the President Elect took place in the late Spring, and it was only a few months later that Palantir and Wendy’s Supply Chain Co-op announced a partnership to “bring [the co-op] towards a fully integrated Supply Chain Network with opportunities for AI-driven, automated workflows,” by moving its supply chain onto Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform. The platform is, familiarly, “designed to connect disparate data sources into a single common operating picture…” Wendy’s will eventually use Palantir to manage its supply chain and waste prevention, including through “Demand Deviation and Allocation.” All of this will push the fast-food company with an otherwise folksy aesthetic, personified through its ginger-haired freckled mascot, Wendy, towards the increasingly technocratic new age—and the Peltz family closer to the Thiel-verse.
Also worth noting is Arianna Huffington’s seat on the board of Twenty. Huffington’s appointment warrants mentioning only because of her relationship with another protege of Peter Thiel, CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The media mogul and tech entrepreneur recently teamed up to create the fitness app Thrive AI Health, which gives users a “hyper-personalized” AI health coach.
Thiel has been described as Altman’s “longtime mentor,” and apparently at the beginning of Altman’s career, “Thiel…saw in Altman a magentic figure who could expand the tech sector’s approach across the world.” Thiel’s rosy view of the OpenAI CEO is evidenced by the mutually beneficial relationship that matured between the two after Altman sold his company Loopt, and Thiel raised the bulk of the $21 million dollars that Altman later gathered for his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital, according to the The Washington Post. Soon after, “Altman’s bond with Thiel blossomed: He helped Thiel’s venture firm, Founder’s Fund, get access to hot start-ups, and the men sometimes traveled together to speak at events.”
Recently, Palantir and another Thiel-backed company, Anduril, have partnered on behalf of the Pentagon to “unlock the full potential of AI for national security,” specifically by retaining data at the “tactical edge” of the battlefield, data that is usually “never retained.” Apparently, this new partnership will make the collection of this “tactical edge” data possible, and be used to train AI models and “deliver the U.S. an advantage over adversaries.” It will also enable “collaboration with leading AI developers, including [Sam Altman’s] OpenAI” (emphasis added).
It now seems that Thiel, through the aforementioned relationships, is not too distant in proximity from (though not directly intertwined with) Healthy Together and Kinsa, all while Palantir further entrenches its relationship with the CDC (as well as the DoD) and positions itself as a health data empire.
Kinsa’s Connections to Bill Gates
Notably, the CEO and founder of Kinsa, Inder Singh, hails from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) where he formerly served as the Executive Vice President. CHAI was controversially created with significant involvement from Jeffrey Epstein, the now infamous pedophile, sex trafficker and intelligence asset, and Epstein was simultaneously involved with Bill Gates during that same period, including the Gates’ family philanthropy (Epstein was notably an advocate for transhumanism and eugenics, which informed much of his “philanthropic” activities and funding of prominent scientists). Unsuprisingly, CHAI has been funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (see here and here), and also shares a nearly identical goal of vaccinating “as many children as possible” with its partner Bill Gates’ Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, by “creating dramatic and sustainable improvements to vaccine markets and national immunization programs.” The Gates Foundation notably envisions AI as central to its global health objectives, as it funded a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—an organization that often acts as a CIA front—effort to push for the global implementation of AI in healthcare.
As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation noted, Gavi’s stated goal is to create “‘healthy markets’ for vaccines by ‘encourag[ing] manufacturers to lower vaccine prices for the poorest countries in return for long-term, high-volume and predictable demand for those countries.’”
And to bring these relationships full circle once again, Palantir joined “The Trinity Challenge” in 2020, “a global coalition of prominent academic institutions and foundations as well as leading technology, health and insurance companies with the aim of increasing the world’s resilience against the pandemics of the future by harnessing the power of data, analytics.” Its members included Google, Microsoft, Facebook, McKinsey & Company and—the Gates Foundation. The Trinity Challenge has been criticized for framing invasive surveillance and neo-Malthusian policies as “solutions” to the “next” pandemic and as beneficial for global public health.
Indeed, the influence of Gates may have navigated its way into CFA itself, with the CFA director, Dylan George, previously serving as vice-president of biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks. Ginkgo Bioworks, a partner of the World Economic Forum, was heavily funded by Cascade Investment when the company went public, an investment firm controlled by Bill Gates. By utilizing a “constellation” of shell companies that all connect back to Cascade, Gates also accumulated enough property to make himself the largest farmland owner in the United States during the Covid-era. Cascade is still the largest shareholder of Ginkgo Bioworks.
It should also be noted that Gates supports the United Nation’s (UN) efforts to implement a universal Digital ID as a “human right,” or in reality, a pre-condition for accessing other human rights, for the entire global population by 2030 through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. Previously, the EU Digital Covid Certificate enabled governments to, as the Pfizer “Outlook” paper advocates, “restrict global travel” based on a form of digital ID, that importantly had health data attached to it (in this case, only COVID-19 immunization status, testing results and records of previous infections.). Multiple groups seeking to impose digital ID infrastructure globally were intimately involved in digital vaccine passport production during the Covid-19 crisis.
It is important to remember that local travel restrictions, or “decisions surrounding community migration,” during the COVID-19 pandemic were enforced using both physical and digital proof-of-vaccination—a form of ID that attaches “health data” to the ID, with that “health data” then being utilized to determine one’s accessibility to certain human rights (such as entry into certain businesses/events or job access).
Gates’ funding of the CDC, as well as his connection to the CFA and the program’s stated policy aims of analyzing disease spread to identify the “highest risk” key populations and utilizing data to influence “community migration” rights raises an important question: will CFA data be attached to a digital ID, and how might that data be used to determine one’s human rights (such as community migration, for example) during a declared, or anticipated, public heath crisis?
AI Hospitals
While Palantir’s recent transition into AI hospital management is not an exact illustration of life with digital ID, some of its features suggest what a future managed by constant surveillance and AI decision-making might look like—not only in healthcare, but the workplace in general.
According to its website’s “Hospitals for Palantir” page, Palantir is already “powering nurse scheduling, nurse staffing, transfer center optimization, discharge management, and other critical workflows” for more than 15% of US hospitals. Palantir’s “healthcare engineers” work “directly alongside caregivers and hospital operators to build and tailor workflows — prioritizing speed, effectiveness, and usability.”
The tech company has “deployed a first of its kind application that takes into account nurse preferences, granular patient demand forecasts, staff competencies, and existing staff information to automatically generate AI-driven, optimal nursing schedules,” a seemingly innocent project. Yet, the degree of influence that this “first of its kind” application already appears to wield in American hospitals spells a troubling precedent for humanity in the workplace—specifically, by dehumanizing the logistical and bureaucratic nature of hospitals through AI substitutes under the auspices of “objective” machine decision-making.
Palantir’s Foundry is already forecasting “the patient census for a hospital based on data from the emergency department, operating rooms, transfers, discharges, and more.” The tech systems also keep track of the skills and information for every nurse in a hospital, “including (but not limited to) competencies, languages, skills, certifications, tenure, and other talent profile information.” Both kinds of data apparently generate the prime nursing schedule for the entire hospital, down to any given “unit, floor, department, [or] facility.”
While these systems project the image of an altruistic product aimed at providing a more seamless experience for patients and hospital workers alike, critical media scholar Dr. Nolan Higdon, co-author of the book “Surveillance Education” which explores the invasive nature of surveillance technologies in schools (as well as the intersection between Big Tech and the military industrial complex), told Unlimited Hangout that Big Tech companies recycle this altruism-pitch time and time again as a way to mask their ulterior motives:
“Whenever these companies employ data collection mechanisms under the auspices of improving the lives of customers, it ultimately ends up being a scheme to make more money, and at the expense of labor and the customer.
What we’ve seen consistently over and over again is whatever readout they get of the data ends up being an excuse to cut jobs, to overwork individuals, to minimize services and access to services as a way to cut costs…So it’s: if we collect data, how much more work can we throw on the back of this nurse? Can we throw enough work on the back of this nurse where patients will complain and we can cut another job or two? Those are the kind of questions that this data is trying to help folks make.”
Yet Higdon fears that this goal of increasing profits could also enable even more vicious price gouging of patients that the healthcare industry already engages in with little transparency. Palantir claims that its tech can recommend in real time where a hospital should place incoming patients based on “patient-specific criteria” and “current and upcoming [hospital] capacity,” which obviously would require access to a breadth of patient data. Higdon wonders whether or not insurance providers might weaponize this data against patients by raising their premiums based on life decisions of the patient:
“Not everybody is totally honest with their insurer about maybe how much they sleep or how much they drink or how much they party or whatever, right? These tools can be a way to surveil people to find that information out to set premiums that are aimed at maximizing the amount of money you get from customers and save the amount of money for the insurance company.
The more they know about your life, the more justifications they can make about setting premiums. Maybe in their algorithmic counts, if you sleep six hours a night instead of eight hours a night, you’re more likely to have these health outcomes. So they’re going to charge you more money now until your sleep patterns change. Or maybe you eat X amount of processed food and that’s been associated with this outcome. So they’re going to charge more on this premium.
There’s so [much] ‘in the weeds’ evidence that can be used against folks, and you don’t have any recourse. Because again, they go back to, ‘well the objective algorithm has given us this readout.’”
While Palantir vows that it keeps “patient privacy and information governance a top priority,” promises like these simply provide tech companies smokescreens to obfuscate the vast amount of data sharing they engage in. Higdon claims that while many companies, like Palantir, promise users that they do not sell client data, those companies still share it between institutions they’ve entered agreements with. On Palantir’s Medium Blog, for example, it vows to readers that it does not sell or share its data with other customers…that is, “except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other.”
However, whether or not this applies specifically to Palantir’s first and longest-running client, the CIA, remains doubtful. Many tech companies, particularly social media giants and search engines, were revealed in past years to illegally share user data with US intelligence to facilitate vast, post-9/11 surveillance programs of dubious legality. Importantly, at Palantir’s origins its founders collaborated with the intelligence state to resurrect a DARPA-CIA surveillance program that sought to merge existing databases into one “virtual, centralized, grand database.” Given this, it seems more than plausible that Palantir allows US intelligence to access more of the data the company handles than they publicly acknowledge.
Palantir also creates profiles of American citizens for the CIA based on their online activities (and other activities that are surveillable). If Higdon’s concerns of data sharing do indeed apply to Palantir, then Palantir could easily fold its trove of American health data into such profiles. In fact, the CFA requires organizations applying to become partners of the program to describe how they plan to leverage novel data sources “to create new analytic products.” An example they provide for applicants involves using “data fusion techniques” to merge data extracted from the internet with “existing public health data streams” in order to create detailed forecasts of present (or future) events that “reduce latency.”
This is particularly troubling given Palantir’s role in implementing “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, in the United States and that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could weaponize mental health data in particular in the context of preventing crimes before they occur. While some may deem this scenario far-fetched, it is worth considering that the previous Trump administration closely considered a policy to use AI to analyze innocent Americans’ social media profiles for posts that could indicate “early warning signs of neuro-psychiatric violence” as a means of preventing mass shootings before they occur. Per that program, the government would subject Americans flagged by the AI to various mandated mental health interventions or preventive house arrest. A scenario in which law enforcement utilizes mental health data from healthcare settings tied to Palantir in lieu of, or in combination with, social media posts is not difficult to envision.
Further, while Palantir claims to make patient privacy a “top priority,” regulatory bodies have yet to enact any meaningful oversight of the company to prevent it from sharing this data with other organizations, much less itself and thus the other branches of government it actively works with. This lack of transparency creates a “hall of mirrors” that blurs the lines between organizations, and therefore who owns what data, covertly eliminating any rights to privacy while at the same time enabling the corporate construction of a digitized global consciousness made up of the data of unknowing civilians—in this case, all in the name of “public health.”
The Hall of Mirrors
The CDC CFA’s alleged commitment to utilize groundbreaking methods to better public health remains to be seen. Yet, what this article definitively illustrates is that the CFA further entrenches both the public and private wings of the public health apparatus into the “hall of mirrors” of intelligence agency-connected corporations and public institutions. Behind these organizations sit some of the most influential kingmakers of Washington, hailing from Silicon Valley, seemingly committed to utilizing any industry or catastrophe to expand their surveillance of human bodies, equipping them with the capital to become the robber barons of the digital age.
Importantly, however, the CFA does not signify a shift in public health policy, but rather a firm step forward in a years-long effort to drive the entire public health apparatus into the hands of hawkish national security ideologues and their oligarchic, technocratic benefactors. For normal people, the implications of such policy pursuits may be significant. During the “future pandemics” that this entire industry is already spending billions of dollars preparing for—with expected returns in mind—the CFA’s surveillance may dictate the average civilians’ global travel rights, even their ability to traverse their own communities, what medicines they take/have access to and whether they are deemed “high risk” or not.
The actors behind this system are unsurprisingly the same ones that planned, directed and carried out the COVID-19, halfway-digitized, iterations of similar biosecurity policy. The fingerprints of figures like Gates, with the head of the CFA hailing from the Gates-funded Gingko Bioworks, and those of Big Pharma and the Pentagon are plastered all over the program’s doctrine.
Critically, the program’s existence should be considered within the context of the coming Trump administration, which boasts deep ties to its most prominent figures. The Thiel-verse have exerted their influence over D.C. politics wisely, demonstrated not only by the plethora of government contracts won by Thiel-connected companies across agencies, but by the infiltration of Thiel proxies like Founders Fund alumnus J.D. Vance into Trump’s cabinet.
As Stavroula Pabst recently noted in Responsible Statecraft, Thiel “bankrolled fellow venture capitalist and now-VP elect J.D. Vance’s successful 2022 Senate Campaign in Ohio to the tune of $15 million — the most anyone has given to a Senate candidate. Thiel and Vance are in fact long term associates, where Thiel previously assisted Vance’s own venture capital career.” While Trump ended up picking the billionaire national security contractor billionaire Stephen Feinberg as his Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was eyeballing Trae Stephens for the position, formerly of Palantir and a “longtime partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman at Anduril,” further demonstrating that the relationship between Thiel and Trump continues to endure. In addition, another Thiel proxy – Jim O’Neill, who boasts deep ties to mRNA tech – has been nominated to be the No. 2 at HHS and will likely serve as HHS Secretary if the Senate rejects the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. O’Neill’s upcoming role at HHS heralds not only a continuation but a likely deepening of Palantir’s involvement at HHS sub-agencies like the CDC.
Companies such as Kinsa and Healthy Together stand as well-positioned potential benefactors of this Thiel-friendly relationship with the coming Trump administration, not only because of the connections Diesel Peltz boasts to PayPal Mafia member Elon Musk, Trump himself and early PayPal investor Ron Conway, but because its products have made it a prominent data-miner at the intersection of healthcare and Big Tech. From this perspective, a myriad of other companies including defense contractors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, sit in a similar position.
Exactly which companies will be tasked to fulfill certain responsibilities remains to be seen, but the agenda-at-large remains the same; massively increase the surveillance powers of this biosurveillance apparatus, and then utilize these powers to influence public policy, increase control of civilian movement and access to rights, secure deregulated markets for biotechnology and, most importantly, make everything about the individual civilian subject to the surveillance, and scrutiny, of the shadowy organizations occupying the watchtower of the digital panopticon.
The privatization, and thus on-the-surface “decentralization” of this program grants it the appearance of the natural evolution of the free market. Yet Palantir’s origins in the DARPA/CIA Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, as well as the merging of all three of these sectors and the clear gains all stand to achieve, suggest a more organized and cynical pursuit of the policies that CFA appears to be making reality. Together, these industries form a technocratic iteration of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Playing specified tunes to targeted audiences, whether they be the altruistic notions of public health, the frightening potentials of unchecked domestic terrorism or bioterrorism, the catastrophe of global pandemics or even simple workplace efficiency, each melody this apparatus plays serves to manufacture consent for their ability to conduct ever-expanding surveillance of everyone. This obviously makes the declared “public health” purposes of the biosurveillance apparatus at large highly questionable.
After all, the AI-healthcare system promises a more efficient, convenient and effective healthcare system—yet the means by which this system is meant to lead the public to a predictive-health utopia involve the elimination of privacy and the dehumanization of healthcare itself. Left to algorithms controlled by corporate sharks and national security hawks, profits, surveillance and top-down influence are an all but guaranteed outcome, but what will the digitization of care do to the physical, mental and spiritual health of everyone else? Perhaps those people—beyond the data that corporations can extract from them—are an afterthought of those behind the AI-healthcare revolution.
