Philadelphia ended its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, a group that runs the city’s largest vaccination site Covid-19, after discovering that it had changed its corporate status from nonprofit to profiteering, and abruptly stopped offering tests, and the privacy policy of its website for reporting vaccinations in a way that enables the sale of user data.
According to NBC Philadelphia, the city’s Department of Public Health announced a “unique public / private partnership” with Philly Fighting COVID three weeks ago, urging residents to pre-register for vaccination on the group’s website.
The city and the group jointly ran a mass vaccination site at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and the relationship was announced by national media, including NBC News.
Monday night, however, the department said in a statement that it had decided to end the relationship after learning that PFC had “changed its corporate status” to profitability and updated its data policy “in a way that allows the organization to sell data collected through PFC’s pre-registration website. ‘
James Garrow, director of the communications department, told NBC News on Tuesday that the group actually changed its status to profit-seeking in December, but first told the city that it was considering such a change in a conversation in January.
Garrow said the group also had a contract with Covid-19 testing with the city on January 31, but that the test was unexpectedly suspended.
PFC updated its data policy on its website on Monday. The new policy states that it will not sell users’ personal data. It does say that it ‘may share your information with our business partners to offer you products, services or promotions.’
PFC published a statement from founder Andrei Doroshin, a 22-year-old student at Drexel University, on its website on Tuesday afternoon, saying: ‘We have never sold or shared or distributed any data we have collected as it would be violation of HIPAA rules. “
PFC removed the ‘problematic’ language in its privacy policy as soon as we became aware of it, ‘the statement read, stating that PFC found that it did not have the means to run both vaccination and testing clinics. and ‘made a choice to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible, because we believe this is what will help end the pandemic.’
Doroshin added that PFC had switched to a profitable company, “so that we could expand our operating team and accelerate the distribution of vaccines … We never hid our intentions in the city and made the change for good reasons.”
According to the Department of Public Health, PFC administered 6,757 vaccine doses to the city.
The city will now plan new vaccination clinics so that people who receive their first doses of PFC in the conference center can receive their second doses elsewhere.