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San Francisco-based health care provider One Medical has come under fire in California, Oregon and Washington for allegedly inoculating healthy young people who were not eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, including friends and family members of the company’s management, and have jumped the line before high-risk patients, according to a survey by NPR.
One Medical has offered the vaccine to all staff in San Francisco County, whether or not they have seen patients in person, according to NPR.
In addition, One Medical patients who were not eligible for vaccination based on local guidelines were allowed to book vaccination appointments through an online portal, NPR said. The same was true for at least one executive from an organization partnering with One Medical. Internal communications show that providers attempt to vaccinate eligible healthcare workers but are instead being told to put them on a list. waiting.”
One Medical is a healthcare provider known for their personalized “concierge service” which accepts a variety of insurance and costs $ 199 per year to join. They have offices in a dozen cities and several in San Francisco.
As a result of the alleged misconduct, the San Francisco Department of Public Health stopped allocating vaccines to the city’s One Medical offices and asked the supplier to return 1,600 doses of the vaccine. “While your answer lists 984 of these doses for DPH walk-in visits and the remaining 636 doses for an ‘Oracle Park Mass Vaccine Launch’, none of these uses are licensed by DPH at this time.” , wrote the department in a letter to A shared medical service with ABC 7.
The department authorizes One Medical to administer every second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients awaiting their final inoculation.
The letter also says the department will be in contact with One Medical “if we are ready to allocate additional doses to One Medical for administration at a later date.”
KCBS Radio reported that Alameda County had also suspended its supplies to One Medical and that Washington state had pulled its vaccine supplies from the offices of state providers.
One Medical issued a statement in response to the NPR report. “Any claim that we are largely and knowingly ignoring the eligibility guidelines is in direct contradiction to our current approach to vaccine administration,” the statement read. “We have a number of checkpoints in place – online when booking an appointment, before the appointment via a labor-intensive ‘digitization of schedules’ process, and a in-person check at point of service if necessary – to limit our vaccine reservation system. We regularly turn down people who do not meet the eligibility criteria. Our data currently shows that 96% of people vaccinated with One Medical nationwide have eligibility documents and the remaining 4% have typically been vaccinated according to zero waste protocols. “
The San Francisco Department of Public Health, the Alameda County Department of Health and the California Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story. The story will be updated during the hearing.
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