On September 14, 2020 UK Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) via their MHRA Buyer Organisation awarded a 1.5 million GBP contract to Genpact (UK) Ltd to “urgently” develop a “an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction (ADRs) and ensure that no details from the ADRs’ reaction text are missed.” [1, 2, 3, 4]
The “Contract award notice” which was published October 19, 2020 on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) stated:
For reasons of extreme urgency under Regulation 32(2)(c) related to the release of a Covid-19 vaccine MHRA have accelerated the sourcing and implementation of a vaccine specific AI tool. …[As] it is not possible to retrofit the MHRA’s legacy systems to handle the volume of ADRs that will be generated by a Covid-19 vaccine.
The contract was awarded “without prior publication“, suggesting MHRA had Genpact in mind to begin with? [5]