Kimberly Paynter/WHYY
toggle caption Kimberly Paynter/WHYY
Andrei Doroshin, CEO of Philly Fighting Covid, speaks to reporters before the start of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Jan. 8. Kimberly Paynter/WHYY
It started out as a group of college friends who wanted to help during the pandemic. They had tech skills, so they used 3D printers to make face shields. Then they organized as a nonprofit, Philly Fighting Covid, and opened a testing site in a Philadelphia neighborhood that didn t have one yet.
But the organization s leader, Andrei Doroshin, had bigger ambitions. Even before the first coronavirus vaccine was authorized, he made plans to be involved. Doroshin is a 22-year-old graduate student in psychology at Drexel University. He has no background in health care.
ABC57 News in South Bend, Ind. covers all of Michiana including St. Joseph, Elkhart, Kosciusko, LaPorte and Marshall counties in Indiana and Berrien, Cass, Van Buren and St. Joseph counties in Mich.
PHILADELPHIA 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.
Farley is taking full responsibility for the now-failed partnership between the city and Philly Fighting COVID. Ultimate, the responsibility for that goes to me. The report will outline more about the process, but ultimately I take responsibility for that, said Dr. Farley.
The report he is referring to was specifically requested by Mayor Jim Kenney on Friday, who has directed the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to take a number of corrective steps following the fallout with Philly Fighting COVID s vaccine distribution.
On Friday morning, Kenney sent a letter to Farley directing the department to host its own clinics and produce a public report within 30 days detailing how the organization came to work with city.
Screenshot: NBC/Today
For some reason the city of Philadelphia decided to partner with a young startup to manage the details of rollout of the covid-19 vaccine. What could go wrong? How about the company’s 22-year-old CEO stealing away with doses to vaccinate his young friends the same day the company turned a slew of vulnerable patients away.
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Days after calling the accusation “baseless,” Andrei Doroshin, a 22-year-old graduate student at Drexel University and the CEO of Philly Fighting COVID, owned up to the accusation during an interview with
Today on Thursday, makingmyriad desperate excuses along the way. “The doses were about to expire,” said Doroshin. “We called everybody we knew, every single person. I stand by that decision.” Sure.