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UK MHRA Contract awarded to Genpact (UK) Ltd

16 November 2020

A contract that has been awarded to a company called Genpact by the UK Government’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to the tune of £1,500,000 listed here (screenshot) on the Ted (Tenders Electronic Daily) website. This site is the European public procurement journal for EU institutions to recruit services and products from favoured corporate mates and fresh-faced startups eager to suck up public money in the name of <insert your favourite existential crisis here>.

This is an interesting one though due to the nature and details of parts of the tender. For example, the short description of the required service is:

The MHRA urgently seeks 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.

Hmmm.

Under the section entitled “Procedure”, the type of procedure is described like this:

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.

Strictly necessary — 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. Therefore, if the MHRA does not implement the AI tool, it will be unable to process these ADRs effectively. This will hinder its ability to rapidly identify any potential safety issues with the Covid-19 vaccine and represents a direct threat to patient life and public health.

Reasons of extreme urgency — the MHRA recognises that its planned procurement process for the SafetyConnect programme, including the AI tool, would not have concluded by vaccine launch. Leading to a inability to effectively monitor adverse reactions to a Covid-19 vaccine.

Events unforeseeable — the Covid-19 crisis is novel and developments in the search of a Covid-19 vaccine have not followed any predictable pattern so far.

This doesn’t sound particularly great. But never fear as with Genpact we’re in safe hands. The Genpact parent company was formed in 1997, is based in Bermuda and has had a meteoric rise since its humble beginnings. According to this site Genpact has:

acquired 23 companies, including 10 in the last 5 years. A total of 8 acquisitions came from private equity firms.

Genpact’s largest acquisition to date was in 2011, when it acquired Headstrong for $550M. Genpact has acquired in 11 different US states, and 5 countries. The Company’s most targeted sectors include information technology (28%) and software (28%).

https://mergr.com/genpact-acquisitions#investors-tab

All totally organic I’m sure. Nothing to do with the Genpact CEO, a certain Mr Tiger Tyagarajan, being a fully committed Great Resetter gushing the latest trend in telling the rest of us we need to retrain.

In the meantime, his company is providing Facebook moderator services, as reported on one of India’s leading media websites here, so we can be assured that his employees are all being treated well. There will definitely be no bias or direction on how topics like vaccination and the whole COVID-19 debacle is “moderated” on Facebook. Oh no. Anyone who expresses any concern about possible “adverse drug reactions” won’t be censored, banned or otherwise de-platformed in the name of addressing “Vaccine Hesitancy”, because if they were as they were spreading “dangerous medical misinformation” based on the details of the very contract Genpact has landed, that wouldn’t make any sense now would it?