Palantir out, demands NHS staff

Doctors and human rights groups are demanding that NHS trust bosses stop using a ‘nothing special’ patient data management platform provided by ‘murder tech’ firm Palantir.

Disgraced Blairite peer Peter Mandelson pushed for Palantir to receive huge UK government contracts, without a competitive process. The Starmer regime awarded them despite – or because of – the firm’s involvement in Israel’s genocide. Despite, too, the fact that Palantir’s bosses are linked to serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein. And boast about using their systems to murder people they don’t like and musing about spraying others with fentanyl-laced piss.

Palantir OUT

The so-called ‘Federated Data Platform’ (FDP) gives Palantir access to patients’ information from all parts of the NHS, supposedly so hospitals can provide more effective treatment more efficiently. But medics and campaigners say there’s “nothing special” about Palantir’s system and no particular benefit to using it – and they decry the government’s “drive” to push hospitals to use it.

Human rights group Amnesty has asked the NHS and all public bodies to dump Palantir completely. Its AI and human rights researcher Matt Mahmoudi said the firm:

has a track record of flagrantly disregarding international law and standards, both in the violations of the human rights of migrants in the United States, which it risks contributing to, and its ongoing supply of artificial intelligence products and services to the Israeli military and intelligence services.

Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne said the company’s involvement is destroying trust in the NHS among patients and staff. She said health workers want the system dropped completely to:

put the interests of patients and workers above American big tech corporations. We know the rollout isn’t going to plan – NHS analysts have told us the software offers nothing special, implementation costs are spiralling and the drive to adopt Palantir tech risks pushing out local, trusted data solutions.

Featured image via the Canary