The allegations raise more alarming questions about Philly Fighting COVID and its leader just hours after the city snatched vaccines from the group because of concerns about its for-profit designation and other “worrying” behaviors, first discovered by WHYY News and Billy Penn in a series of stories from last week.
In a non-contractual agreement, the city provided Philly Fighting COVID with thousands of doses of vaccine to distribute at the city’s mass vaccination site that opened at the Pennsylvania Convention Center earlier this month.
According to Pennsylvania’s licensing requirements, which the city of Philadelphia follows, only a few medical professionals – including doctors, nurses and pharmacists – can administer immunizations. Students and other technicians may be qualified to administer vaccines under direct supervision. Doroshin, a graduate student in neuroscience at Drexel, does not meet any of these criteria for anyone who can inject a vaccine.
In an unrelated interview last week, Health Department spokesman James Garrow used this same scenario as an example of disqualifying practice for the city’s partner organization.
“If Andrei Doroshin is distributing vaccines, I would like to know that because then we would close them,” said Garrow.
Lipinksy also said that there were medical students, nurses and staff who were administering vaccines and filling syringes with fluid. Under Pennsylvania law, these individuals can vaccinate if they are under direct supervision. Lipinsky said that clinical professionals were around, but not directly supervising.
“They ran like children at the end of the day, vaccinating each other,” she said.
Lipinksi herself was not asked about her credentials as a registered nurse until she had already volunteered at the clinic, she said.
Formed last spring, Philly Fighting COVID ceased to be a student-run group that manufactured PPE, started building one of the largest coronavirus testing operations in the entire city and became the city’s first mass vaccine distributor in just nine months.
This astral trajectory came to an abrupt end on Monday, after the city spent weeks distancing itself from its once confident partner in the fight against the pandemic. It is unclear whether the city knew about claims that Doroshin was getting vaccines on Saturday before ending his relationship.
In recent interviews with national publications, Doroshin compared his vision of a vaccination program in a franchise similar to McDonald’s and “a factory” that could move from city to city. He also advocated “stop using best practices” for the sake of efficiency.
“The old best health practices in terms of intramuscular injections were written for a visit to the hospital that would take 30 minutes and you would charge as a visit from the provider,” Doroshin told HealthDay in an interview last week. “Most of these best practices can go out the window.”
This is breaking news and will be updated.