Philly’s bungled COVID-19 vaccine rollout erodes trust at a time when it’s needed the most | Jenice Armstrong

The ineptitude of this city’s leadership astounds me.

At a time when residents need them more than ever, local officials have proven once again they just aren’t up to the challenge.

It’s already hard enough to persuade residents to put their skepticism aside and get themselves inoculated against COVID-19. But after witnessing the debacle that local government officials have made of the city’s vaccine rollout, it may be even more difficult to get folks to roll up their sleeves.

Public trust has been eroded. I wouldn’t be surprised if elderly residents and health-care workers take a look at what’s going on and wait a while longer before getting vaccinated. I really hope they won’t do that, but it could happen.

The blame for allowing Philly Fighting COVID to oversee the city’s largest coronavirus vaccination effort lies with the city officials who green-lighted the arrangement in the first place. Experienced people with medical backgrounds should have been placed in charge — not a Drexel University graduate student.

Deputy Healthy Commissioner Caroline Johnson, who had worked closely with Philly Fighting COVID’s CEO, Andrei Doroshin, resigned Saturday after records obtained by The Inquirer showed she gave him an advantage in a city bidding process by providing a suggested budget number.

» READ MORE: The city trusted a group of ‘college kids’ to lead its vaccine rollout. But Philly Fighting COVID was full of red flags from the start.

This is all such a mess.

It’s not as if Philadelphia doesn’t have qualified alternatives readily available such as the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which was formed last spring to address the disproportionate impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on African Americans. Founded by board-certified surgeon Ala Stanford, that group is more than capable of doing the work. It has been testing residents mostly at local churches for months and recently began administering vaccinations, as well.

Leaders emerge during tough times like this pandemic we’re experiencing. Stanford has more than proven herself to be up to the challenge. Next to Health Commissioner Thomas Farley, she is arguably the most trusted person in Philadelphia when it comes to dispensing advice for dealing with the pandemic.

“I think it’s time to just talk about the elephant in the room, and that’s the implicit bias and just injustice and racism and I’m just going to say that because if you look at everything on paper … in terms of the experience, in terms of the earned trust in the community, we exhibited all of those qualities consistently,” Stanford said on MSNBC Sunday. “We started not because there was [a request for proposals] but because there was a need in the community. No one asked us to do it. It wasn’t our job. It was that African Americans, their lives were not being valued and we decided collectively that we were going to change that and try to level the playing field that had never been leveled.

“ … We’re the operation with licensed doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, all of whom were asked to show their credentials, their resumes. We needed letters of recommendation before we could even start. So it’s unclear to me how this organization — if they were judged with the same scrutiny — was even ever able to get off the ground, quite honestly. And so I think we have to look not just in Philadelphia but the deep-rooted problem that allows you to look at an organization that has been doing the work even before you joined forces with them and overlooks them primarily for another group that’s unestablished, younger, not led by a physician and white.”

Philly Fighting COVID switched its status from nonprofit to for-profit in the midst of everything and wording on the group’s website left the possibility open for residents’ medical information to have been sold. Doroshin, who doesn’t have a medical background, also admitted taking vaccine for personal use and administering it.

At a time when so much lip service is being paid to the need for racial equity, the optics of this are really bad. Philly can get out of this morass by doing what it should have done in the first place: putting Stanford and the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium in charge.