The city of Philadelphia decided to have college students with limited experience administer COVID-19 vaccines for some reason. It did not go well.
Who could have predicted such a thing would happen?
Antonia Noori Farzan reports at the Washington Post:
Philadelphia let ‘college kids’ distribute vaccines. The result was a ‘disaster,’ volunteers say.Philadelphia is home to some of the most venerated medical institutions in the country. Yet when it came time to set up the city’s first and largest coronavirus mass vaccination site, officials turned to the start-up Philly Fighting COVID, a self-described “group of college kids” with minimal health-care experience.Chaos ensued.Seniors were left in tears after finding that appointments they’d made through a bungled sign-up form wouldn’t be honored. The group switched to a for-profit model without publicizing the change and added a privacy policy that would allow it to sell users’ personal data. One volunteer alleged that the 22-year-old CEO had pocketed vaccine doses. Another described a “free-for-all” where unsupervised 18- and 19-year-olds vaccinated one another and posed for photos.Now, the city has cut ties with Philly Fighting COVID, and prosecutors are looking into the “concerning” allegations.The group offered a partial apology Tuesday while defending the switch to for-profit status, and CEO Andrei Doroshin told Philadelphia magazine that claims he had helped himself to leftover vaccine doses were “baseless.”
Here’s a short video report from NBC News in Philadelphia:
Just stunning.
Philadelphia Magazine has more on the young man behind this outfit:
Who, Exactly, Is Philly Fighting COVID?Andrei Doroshin is 22 years old, working toward his degree at Drexel, and a C-suite executive in three different businesses: a real estate firm (CEO), a biotech company (CBO), and, most notably, an organization called Philly Fighting COVID (CEO). That’s the group that had been tapped by health officials to run Philadelphia’s first mass vaccination clinic. But just two and a half weeks after the first clinic went live, the city cut ties with them over concerns about its data privacy policy, its sudden shift to for-profit status, and its failure to maintain testing sites.Now, Doroshin is facing additional allegations that he took unused vaccine with him after one of his clinics and may have administered vaccines off site. (Doroshin denies doing this.) The entire episode — from the city’s sudden about-face on using Philly Fighting COVID to provide vaccinations to the growing accusations piling up against Doroshin — raises questions about how, especially in a city so vaunted for its supposed “meds and eds” complex, a group of unproven 20-somethings ended up first in line to vaccinate the public during the most important public-health crisis in a generation.
The city people responsible for making this happen should be fired, but probably won’t.
Featured image via YouTube.
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