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The allegations raise more alarming questions about Philly Fighting COVID and its leader just hours after the city withdrew vaccines from the group amid concerns over its for-profit designation and other ‘troubling’ behaviors discovered for the first time by WHYY News and Billy Penn in a story series last week.
In a non-contractual agreement, the city had provided Philly Fighting COVID with thousands of doses of the vaccine to distribute at the city’s mass vaccination site that opened at the Pennsylvania Convention Center earlier this month.
Under Pennsylvania licensing requirements, which the City of Philadelphia follows, only certain medical professionals – including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists – can administer immunizations. Students and other technicians may be permitted to administer vaccines under direct supervision. Doroshin, a graduate student in neuroscience at Drexel, does not meet any of these criteria for who can inject a vaccine.
In an unrelated interview last week, Department of Health spokesman James Garrow used this very scenario as an example of a disqualifying practice for the city’s partner organization.
“If Andrei Doroshin is handing out vaccines, I would like to know because then we would stop them,” Garrow said.
Lipinksy also said there were medical students, nursing students and staff who administered vaccines and filled syringes with fluid. Under Pennsylvania law, these people are allowed to vaccinate if they are under direct supervision. Lipinsky said clinical professionals were nearby, but not directly supervising.
“They were running like kids at the end of the day getting vaccinated,” she says.
Lipinksi herself was not applied for her registered nursing degrees until she previously volunteered at the clinic, she said.
Formed last spring, Philly Fighting COVID has grown from a group of students making PPE, to setting up one of the largest city-wide coronavirus testing operations, to the first mass distributor of vaccines in just nine months.
That astral trajectory ended abruptly on Monday after the city spent weeks distancing itself from the once-confident partner in the fight against the pandemic. It remains unclear whether the city was aware of the allegations that Doroshin was taking vaccines on Saturday before ending their relationship.
In recent interviews with national publications, Doroshin compared his vision of a vaccination program to a McDonald’s-type franchise 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 healthcare practices in terms of intramuscular injections were written for a hospital visit that would take 30 minutes that you would bill as a visit to the provider,” Doroshin told HealthDay in an interview. last week. “Most of these best practices can go outside the window.”
This is breaking news and will be updated.
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