PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) -- The Philadelphia Department of Public Health is cutting ties with Philly Fighting COVID, which was running a mass vaccination clinic at the Convention Center. The city says it was alarmed by changes the organization recently made, including a shift away from being a nonprofit.
The health department said Monday that it will no longer partner with the company on testing or vaccination.
"We have recently been made aware of a change in PFC's corporate status that took place without our knowledge, from nonprofit to for-profit," a health department spokesman said in a statement.
The city also says it was concerned about the organization's data privacy policy. Officials believe the group could have sold the data it acquired through its vaccine pre-registration portal on its website, which includes the identities of many more people than had actually been vaccinated.
However, the health department says it has not been notified of any instances of information being sold. And Doroshin told the Philadelphia Inquirer that they have not sold any data and never intended to.
Those who are interested in getting vaccinated are encouraged now to sign up at phila.gov/vaccineinterest.
This is a dramatic shift in the relationship between the city and the organization, which was originally founded in the early stages of the pandemic to provide PPE where it was needed in the city. It then shifted to coronavirus testing, which unexpectedly stopped as the organization turned its attention to vaccines.
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Before PFC's first mass vaccination event on Jan. 8 at the Convention Center, Mayor Jim Kenney, Deputy Health Commissioner Caroline Johnson and Councilmembers Cindy Bass, Bobby Henon and Mark Squilla spoke at a press conference about the importance of getting vaccinated and praised the company's work.
CEO, 22-year-old Drexel student Andrei Doroshin, also talked about PFC's partnership with the city and his grand ambitions to expand vaccination efforts.
"We’re gonna open up three more pods (in the convention center). The capacity is gonna be around 8,000 in a day. And then we’re gonna operate this until COVID is over," Doroshin said to KYW Newsradio that day. "Our next site is actually going to be the stadiums, and that site will have the capacity to do 20,000 people in a day."
It's not clear what progress the company has made toward those goals.
The organization vaccinated thousands of people in the last few weeks. Now, the health department says it will contact each of those people to schedule "new clinics to ensure that people who were vaccinated at PFC’s clinics at the convention center can get their second dose."
Doroshin's biography and information about other PFC team members have been scrubbed from their website.