Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
City’s vaccine rollout raises larger questions
A mass vaccination site is closed after City Hall officials learn of concerns about the operator.
PHILADELPHIA » When Philadelphia began getting its first batches of COVID-19 vaccines, it looked to partner with someone who could get a mass vaccination site up and running quickly.
City Hall officials might have looked across the skyline to the world-renowned health providers at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University or Jefferson Health.
Instead, they chose a 22-year-old graduate student in psychology with a few faltering startups on his resume. And last week, amid concerns about his qualifications and Philly Fighting COVID’s for-profit status, the city shuttered his operation at the downtown convention center.
“Where were all the people with credentials? Why did a kid have to come in and help the city?” said the student, Andrei Doroshin.
“I’m a freaking grad student. But you know what? We did the job. We vaccinated 7,000 people,” the Drexel University student said. “This was us doing our part in this crazy time.”
City officials said they gave him the task because he and his friends had organized one of the community groups that set up COVID-19 testing sites throughout the city last year. But they shut the vaccine operation down once they learned that Doroshin had switched his privacy notice to potentially sell patient data, a development he calls a glitch that he quickly fixed.
It’s not clear when the city will find a new site operator.
“They were doing a reasonably good job on giving the vaccinations. They decided apparently that they were going to monetize some of this information, which was wrong, and we terminated our relationship with them,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at a news conference Tuesday, citing the work of local news outlets in raising the concerns. “And that’s the end of them.”
Doroshin also conceded that he took home four doses of the Pfizer vaccine and administered it to friends, although he is neither a nurse nor licensed health practitioner. He said he did so only after exhausting other options. There were 100 extra doses set to expire that night, and the site was able to round up just 96 eligible recipients, he said.
“They either had to go into an arm or be thrown out,” said Doroshin, who said he had done intramuscular injections before. “I felt OK ethically . ... There’s nothing that I did that was illegal.”
State and local prosecutors are now pondering the question.
For now, the city has pledged to make sure people who got their first vaccines there can get their booster shots.
“It certainly shows why we need a real public health care system,” said Council Member Helen Gym, who noted that two private hospitals in the city have closed since 2019, while the city remains one of the few large U.S. cities without a public hospital.
She called the aborted vaccine rollout “an egregious, profound failure.”