Philadelphia ended its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, a group that ran the city’s largest Covid-19 vaccination site after discovering that it had changed its corporate status from non-profit to for-profit, abruptly interrupting the testing offer and updating the privacy policy on your vaccination is registered on the website in order to allow the sale of user data.
Three weeks ago, the city’s Department of Public Health announced a “unique public / private partnership” with Philly Fighting COVID, according to NBC Philadelphia, and asked residents to pre-register for vaccination on the group’s website.
The city and the group together ran a mass vaccination post at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and the relationship was publicized by national media, including NBC News.
On Monday night, however, the department said in a statement that it decided to end the relationship after learning that PFC had changed “its corporate status” to for profit and had updated its data policy “in a way that could allow the organization to sell data collected through the PFC pre-registration website. “
James Garrow, the department’s communications director, told NBC News on Tuesday that the group changed its status to for-profit in December, but only told the city that it was considering such a change during a conversation in January.
Garrow said the group also had a contract with the city for Covid-19 testing until January 31, but unexpectedly suspended testing.
The PFC updated its data policy on its website on Monday. The new policy says it will not sell users’ personal data. However, he says that “you can share your information with our business partners to offer you certain products, services or promotions”.
PFC published a statement by founder Andrei Doroshin, a 22-year-old graduate student at Drexel University, on its website on Tuesday afternoon, saying, “We never sell, we will never sell, share or disclose any data that we collect as they would be in violation of HIPAA rules. “
PFC removed the “problematic” language in its privacy policy “as soon as we became aware of it,” the statement said, and that when the vaccines were made available, PFC found that it had no resources to run vaccination and testing clinics and ” has chosen to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible, as we believe it will help end this pandemic. “
Doroshin added that PFC moved to a for-profit company, “so that we could expand our operations team and accelerate the distribution of the vaccine … We never hid our intentions with the city and we were making the move for good reasons.”
The PFC administered 6,757 doses of vaccine to the city, according to the Public Health Secretariat.
The city will schedule new vaccination clinics so that people who have received their first doses of PFC at the convention center can receive their second doses elsewhere.