Top software entrepreneur Larry Ellison is a significant patron of the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), an intriguing revelation from the 2020 tax return of the Larry Ellison Foundation. Reports indicate that the founder of Oracle Corporation and its present CTO has made a grand contribution of $33.83 million and is poised to donate an additional $49.37m to the institute in the near future.
The ties that bind Ellison and Blair’s Institute seem to extend beyond monetary donations. The Tony Blair Institute, a charitable organization established in 2016, envisions bolstering governmental policies and strategies through technology.
The partnership comes in the form of a planned collaborative venture, generously backed by Ellison’s funds, aiming to provide African countries with a comprehensive database to record vaccination information and aid in disease control. This digital database, to be freely accessible for at least a decade, embodies the Institute’s goal to expand this system across the African continent.
Initiatives in countries like Kenya include a biometric database where all babies are entered on birth.
The collaboration extends further; Oracle’s board director Awo Ablo also holds the position of executive vice president of Strategy and Partnerships at TBI. It seems both Ellison and Blair manifest a mutual interest in health databases.
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Paradoxically, in June last year, Ellison’s Oracle acquired Cerner, a health sector software specialist, for a whopping $28.3 billion, The Register reported.
It’s this acquisitive quest where Ellison ambitiously proposed a united national health database amalgamating thousands of separate hospital databases in the US. Yet, a $10 billion Cerner project has encountered a setback as the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided to focus on the improvement of five sites using the new EHR in light of patient safety concerns, causing Oracle to reassess the contract terms.
