The city of Philadelphia has cut ties with a Covid-19 vaccine provider, saying it lost “trust in them as an organization,” after a slew of controversial moves by the group and its 22-year-old CEO, who admitted Thursday he took vaccine doses and administered them to four friends.
Additionally, Philly Fighting COVID (PFC) unexpectedly shuttered its Covid-19 testing operations to focus on vaccine administration and changed from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit entity — a shift the health department said it learned about from local news outlets.
Concerns were also raised about changes to PFC’s privacy policy that would allow it to sell patients’ data collected through their online registration site, according to a report from a local news outlet.
“Trust is the most important thing we have when giving out vaccine, and we couldn’t ask Philadelphians to trust an outfit that we no longer trusted,” James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health, told CNN on Thursday. “So we immediately ended the relationship.
“The department announced Tuesday it “will no longer work with Philly Fighting COVID to provide testing or vaccines, effective immediately,” following local news reports of growing concerns around PFC’s operations.
WHYY, a public news outlet, reported on January 20 that the PFC’s sudden shift to a profit-making business to “focus on vaccine operations” left some Philadelphia communities and residents without testing with no warning.
WHYY later reported on PFC’s updated privacy policy, which Garrow told the outlet “could allow the organization to sell data collected through PFC’s pre-registration site,” though the city has no proof any data was sold. PFC’s CEO has denied it ever sold any data.
On top of all that, 22-year-old CEO Andrei Doroshin said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” on Thursday he had taken Covid-19 vaccines intended for eligible recipients and administered them to four of his friends.
Doroshin said he was trying to prevent the doses from going to waste and that he couldn’t find anyone else who might need the vaccine more than his friends before they expired.
“The doses were about to expire,” he told NBC. “We called everybody we knew. Every single person.”
CNN has reached out to Doroshin for comment but has not heard back.