Speaking to Today, Doroshin said that his lack of a traditional public health background allowed him to “think a little differently” and speed up the vaccination process. In another interview he expressed hopes of setting up a McDonald’s-like franchise and suggested that best practices for administering vaccine doses “can go out the window.”
Philly Fighting COVID’s young, entrepreneurial leaders also openly talked about the potential for profit, one former volunteer told WHYY: “They were bragging about how rich they were going to get.” Another volunteer said the group’s executives “said they were gonna be millionaires” by billing insurance providers for administering vaccine doses that Philly Fighting COVID got free. (Doroshin has disputed these allegations.)
The city’s partnership with the group began drawing scrutiny last week after WHY reported that Philly Fighting COVID had abruptly backed out of plans to host coronavirus testing clinics in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods and “completely ghosted” community leaders, as one pastor put it. Then, on Saturday, dozens of seniors lined up for hours to be vaccinated at the Pennsylvania Convention Center only to be turned away because the group had accidentally allowed too many people to sign up.
"There were literally 85-year-old, 90-year-old people standing there in tears, with printed appointment confirmations, saying: ‘I don’t understand why I can’t get vaccinated. I’m 85,’ ” one witness told the station.
A registered nurse who volunteered with the group categorized it as a “disaster of an operation.” Katrina Lipinsky told the Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY that she wasn’t asked for her medical credentials before she began administering vaccine doses, and that plenty of unused doses were left over after seniors were turned away on Saturday. She alleged that she saw Doroshin place between 10 and 15 of those doses in his bag and take them with him when he left.
The 22-year-old CEO attended a small gathering with friends that night, according to WHYY, and a photo that circulated on Snapchat appeared to show him “getting ready to administer an unspecified syringe” to an individual in a private home.
Philadelphia Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said at a Tuesday briefing that the allegations were “very disturbing” if true, and that any leftover vaccine doses should have been returned to the city. He also said that “in retrospect” it was a mistake to partner with the group."
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Ya think?????
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"Doroshin’s main qualification might have been that he’s audacious enough to suggest he’s qualified in the first place. There’s no denying his knack for salesmanship. His bio on the Philly Fighting COVID webpage states that he began his career as a director of photography for AND Productions in Los Angeles, formed and taught at the Rancho Mirage Film Department, then resigned to start a nonprofit focused on air pollution.
Left unsaid is the fact that AND Productions was founded by Doroshin’s father and appears to have no real online footprint. The YouTube channel for Doroshin’s other film project, a production company he founded called SpeedJumpFilms, includes one short film, along with videos of people longboarding and doing not-especially-impressive parkour routines. The Rancho Mirage Film Department was a high-school film class Doroshin helped teach while he was a student there, and the nonprofit he started, Invisible Sea, mostly consisted of a meme-heavy Twitter account, some minor community lobbying, and a fund-raiser with a $50,000 goal that netted $684. (“It didn’t do very well,” Doroshin says of the nonprofit. He also admits that his time at AND Productions — when he was a 14-year-old making short films with his dad — probably shouldn’t have been on his official bio. “I’m sorry about that,” he says.)
Other members of Philly Fighting COVID’s leadership don’t seem to have the qualifications typical of a group running a complex public-health operation, either. The group’s chief science officer is Karol Osipowicz, a Drexel neuroscience professor who also happens to be Doroshin’s academic adviser, not to mention a non-academic adviser to Doroshin’s real estate venture, Tala Resorts. In his official Philly Fighting COVID bio, Johnathan Lawless, the group’s “head of systems” (and the co-founder of the biotech company for which Doroshin moonlights as chief business officer), says he graduated from Drexel in 2019 with a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering and claims to have “played important roles at Johnson & Johnson,” though according to his LinkedIn profile, he only worked there for seven months while still in school.
No one on the group’s “executive team” boasts an advanced degree in public health or is an MD, though there are a few nurses and one doctor on the “operations team.” Many staffers appear to be in their 20s. And in a city that has struggled mightily to vaccinate Black people — a group that has received just 12 percent of all vaccines despite accounting for 44 percent of the population — everyone in a leadership position at Philly Fighting COVID is white. (Shortly after the city broke off its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, the organization deleted its list of staff from its website, an action Doroshin says he took because staffers were being harassed.)
Doroshin insists that his background doesn’t really matter; when the government and health-care institutions were scrambling to respond to the pandemic, his group stepped up. “Our expertise is we’re just trying to help,” he says."
Yeah...about that....Toxic entitlement.
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
"Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
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