Today, Explained - The Fyre Festival of vaccine rollouts

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The city of Philadelphia put an opportunistic 22-year-old in charge of its vaccine rollout. Nina Feldman of WHYY’s Half Vaxxed podcast explains how it went just as badly as you’d expect. Today’s show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and how at this point you can basically walk into any vaccination site in the country and they'll just give you one. But remember when a vaccine was like a golden ticket? Remember when all people talked about was their appointment or their anticipation of their appointment or which shot they were going to get and what that meant? Today's episode is set during that bygone era in Philadelphia, a city that is near and dear to our hearts here at Today Explained. This past winter, Philadelphia entrusted its first vaccine clinics to a nine-month-old organization

run by a 22-year-old graduate student with no healthcare experience. I'm gonna say that again. The city of Philadelphia entrusted its first vaccine clinics to a nine-month-old organization run by a 22-year-old grad student with no healthcare experience.

Nina Feldman has been covering the story for WHYY Public Radio in Philadelphia. Nina, where does this story begin? Well, it actually starts a couple of months before those clinics first opened when the vaccine became available, back in the summer of 2020, when the vaccines were still a few months off and what we were really focused on was testing. And back then, this startup group called Philly Fighting COVID had launched testing sites to really fill a need that the city was struggling to fill. It was kind of hard at the time, if you remember, to find testing that was free, that you didn't need a doctor's note for, and that maybe you didn't need symptoms for. So these kids,

college students, got together and launched a testing site that, you know, was easy and accessible. College students. I mean, that sounds exceptional. Yep. And the whole thing was the brainchild of this guy, Andre DeRoshan. He was 22 years old, like you said. He was a graduate student in the psychology program at Drexel University in Philadelphia. And at this point, he was a leader. He was pulling together pre-med students who were looking for a way to help in the pandemic, and there weren't really a lot of options for that. It was almost like a ticket into schools or a ticket into jobs and stuff like that. If you told them you worked and volunteered there, people would be like, oh my god, that's amazing. Like, you're a hero.

Like, all that stuff. You know, Andre had kind of this, like, startup vibe as a boss. He was fun. He was laid back. He wasn't, you know, some hospital administrator. He was a cool guy. But I remember he didn't pay me. He just gave me a can of vodka, And I was like, this is lit.

Like, I'd come home and be like, guys, look what I got from work. Guy running COVID testing sites is handing out handles of vodka to his employees instead of paying them money. Red flag for sure. Is that how you came to report on this guy, Andre? Well, I first heard about Philly fighting COVID and Andre a couple months later. It was January of 2021, and the first vaccines had just arrived in Philadelphia. And the city announced that it was working with Philly fighting COVID to launch the city's first mass vaccination clinic for healthcare workers. So this organization run by young adults will be handling Philly's first vaccination center? That's right. And I was a little surprised by that. I mean, I have been covering the pandemic since it started, and I had vaguely heard of these guys. I mean, I knew that they were operating a testing site, but it did surprise me that, you know, Philly is an eds and meds town.

It's a place that is known for its reputable, you know, hospital systems attached to universities. Yeah. But you know what? I figured it must be a bigger operation than I realized. I'll suspend judgment at this point. But then things started to get a little bit weird. Good morning again. First, I want to thank the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Philly Fighting COVID for organizing this clinic.

Andre gets up on stage at this press kickoff event to, you know, launch the partnership, launch the vaccine clinic. And there are just all these little signals of the way he's talking about this that just doesn't quite seem normal. What you see here is the problem that we've been solving for six months. This is the problem of vaccinating an entire population of people on a scale that has never been seen before in the history of our species. Epic stuff. And there were a few sort of discrepancies with the numbers that he offered, too. Just things that he claimed were true that I knew were wrong.

And they just kind of set off my antenna. So after the press conference, I found Andre. He was standing outside the clinic area with his giant English bulldog, Winston. Oh, he's our head of security. Sorry, his security badge. He goes everywhere with me.

I told him I had some questions about costs. Curious about how much it costs to run an event like this per day. I can't actually tell you those specifics. But I can tell you it's a really nice Mercedes. And I just had never had anybody answer a question about what I assumed to be a city funded operation like that before. And so, you know, I pet his bulldog and I packed up my gear and I went home and started poking around. Andre presented himself as sort of a wunderkind. His resume listed him as an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, the director of something called the Rancho Mirage Film Department. But when we started to kind of peel back the surface, none of it really added up.

It turned out the videos from the Rancho Mirage film department were all on YouTube, and they were made by Andre as a high schooler. Ah, I've heard of you. You're that Marine. Yeah, and I've heard of you. You're that Marine. Yeah. And I came here for answers. There was one called A Day in the Life of Andre DeRoshan. I guess in my head, the day starts with the first lift. The best sound in the world.

The 45-pound plates hitting up against each other. Oh, he calls the gym church. I don't know what it is with that sound. It says, let's go. And in this film, Andre walks through his typical day at his high school. That's when it started to become clear that the Ransom Mirage film department was in fact his high school film club. So he's a bit of a grifter. Yeah. And, you know, we asked him about that. And he stuck by, in an interview that we had with him, he stuck by the fact that those things did give him experience

in sort of the corporate and nonprofit world. But do you get the sense that he's using similar tactics with the city of Philadelphia? Yeah, that was exactly our concern in our reporting was, you know, he's making all these claims about these big, bold organizations that he's been instrumental in the formation of and saying they were huge successes. And, you know, what does he have to show for it? And so we asked him about it, specifically where his money to run a vaccine site like this was coming from. Any other light you can shed from a public interest perspective on who's funding an operation that the city is, you know, so closely in partnership with?

Do you know who the investors of CVS are? And you probably don't, right? Because nobody cares. They deliver a service. The service is done. We promise people a service. We've delivered the service. I think the only people concerned about that funding is you. Why is it that it's just essentially you in your newsroom asking these questions about Andre and Philly fighting COVID? Was the work legit? I think the work looked legit to the city on the surface. But the people who were a part of Philly fighting COVID would be the first to tell you that the testing sites were not perfect. Things were not going that well.

You know, the volunteers that we talked to said that there was a point at which Andre sort of abandoned the idea of testing as the primary objective and goal and moved towards, we want to be the city of Philadelphia's primary vaccine provider. And in so doing, we're going to make a lot of money. And that was this sort of pivotal shift that happened that the volunteers told us you could sort of see play out in real time. Andres started changing his look. At first he would always show up in like his little Skechers sneakers with his android and his scrubs. He showed up late in like kind of fancy outfits. I remember being like okay like that's weird that he's like in a fur coat on a testing site. He looked like a boss mafia man. Like I thought he was part of the mafia. On top of that, the testing site became super disorganized.

It was kind of like a walking HIPAA violation. And as a part of their city contract for testing, Philly Fighting COVID was required to test underserved populations. And the testing site they had set up was in an almost completely white neighborhood. And, you know, they could have been testing Black and Latino communities there. That's possible. But there was no way to know because they were not fulfilling their obligation to track demographic data as a testing site for the city. So for some of the idealistic volunteers that we talked to,

some of the sheen started to wear off as all of this stuff added up. I remember my mom literally telling me that. I was in New York for the weekend. She was like, something is going to like blow up in their faces. This is going to go down in flames. So what happens when this group actually starts administering the vaccine?

They got a lot of national media attention. NBC's Stephanie Gosk live with his story. Steph, this sounds like a pretty cool kid. Yeah, he definitely is, Craig. And you know, they framed themselves as kind of disrupting healthcare as we know it. They really knew how to sell themselves. We don't think like institutional, you know, we're engineers, we're scientists, computer scientists, we're cybersecurity nerds. We think a little differently than people in health care do. But for us on the ground, questions about Philly fighting COVID were just growing. And one thing we found out that really surprised us and that had really surprised a lot of the people who were partnering with them was that in order to pivot to vaccines, they had to cancel their

entire testing operation. And what that meant was that organizations who they were partnering with in primarily Black and Latino neighborhoods who had been relying on them to do testing events and to test people in their communities had the rug pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, Philly Fighting COVID is still vaccinating people. The first weekend of vaccinations turned into a second, turned into a third. And then that third weekend of vaccinations is when everything kind of came crashing down. Everyone was scared. Everyone's like, oh no, are they going to pull the contract? Are they going to do this? We were, it was like being on a sinking ship. You have to remember, people were desperate for vaccines back then.

There were not enough for the number of people who wanted them. Philly Fighting COVID had been turning people away at the door. There were people who they hadn't invited to their clinic who were eligible for the vaccine. They were old. They were chronically ill.

That was pretty traumatic for a lot of people. And then kind of the kicker was that at the end of the clinic one day, after having turned all of those people away, there was a surplus of doses, it turned out. We talked to one nurse who was there on site, Katrina Lipinski, and she said during that sort of frenzied time when volunteers were going around vaccinating each other and everybody was calling everybody they knew to come and get the extra

doses, she watched Andre as he walked from the vaccine area over to his belongings and packed, I don't know how many vaccines, I would guess maybe 10 or 15, in a plastic bag with the CDC vaccination record card. He packed it up and he left with another staff member. Later that evening, a Snapchat photo circulated with Andre holding the syringes, preparing to inject his friends with them. How does that work out for him? That was a Saturday, and by Monday, the city had cut ties with the group. I gotta say, though, like, for a dodgy character

with lots of dodgy things going on, him taking 15 shots home that may not have been used by anyone that night that may have been thrown in a trash can doesn't feel like the coup de grace that would get him canceled or anything like that. Yeah, a lot of people felt that way. You know, that was a time when

we didn't want any of the vaccine doses to go to waste. I think what set this apart is that, you know, Andre was not a healthcare worker. He had no certification. He was not certified to be able to administer a vaccine. And I think it was sort of paired with this earlier operational error where they screwed up and were turning these old people away at the door. But the other thing is that this

was not the only thing that the health department cited as the reason that they cut ties with the city. They also noted that they did not like that Philly Fighting COVID canceled its testing operation so abruptly. They thought that was really inappropriate. They noted that they didn't like that Philly Fighting COVID had decided to form a for-profit arm right as it was being tapped to be the city's vaccine provider for these mass clinics. They thought that was inappropriate at this juncture. And they also noted that Philly Fighting COVID had a privacy policy as a part of its incorporation to this for-profit entity that would have allowed the group to sell patient data. So after getting like national media attention and being sort of a success story, the whole thing falls apart. Yeah. And it was a disaster. I mean,

the national media came back around and after fawning all over Andre DeRoshan and Philly fighting COVID initially, they had a whole new take now. Are you qualified to give a vaccine? I am not a nurse. I have undergone our internal certifications. But Andre, you're not qualified, right? No. And the whole scandal even made it

to late night talk show circuits with Stephen Colbert. The only thing college kids are good at distributing are ultimate Frisbee sign-up sheets and HPV. And where does this leave Philly's vaccination program? Well, Philly Fighting COVID's vaccine clinic shut down, leaving thousands of people who they'd given the first dose to sort of with nowhere to turn, having no idea where they were going to get their second shot. And the whole city had the same question, which is just who let this happen? Thank you. The number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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Terms and conditions do apply. Ah, I've heard of you. You're that Marine. Yeah, and I came here for answers. Okay, Nina, how did the city of Philadelphia let this happen? How did it hand over testing and then vaccination to a 22-year-old grad student with a big fancy dog and little to no experience? Our first instinct in trying to answer that question was to look for a, you know, smoking gun in a pay-to-play scheme. Philadelphia is

no stranger to corruption, and we thought it was really possible that there might be somebody in city government who had put this kid on the fast track to vaccines in hopes of getting a kickback later on. So we spent some time looking into that and it really didn't look like the evidence was there for it. You know, people wanted to help him, but it was only because they wanted to get Philadelphia vaccinated. I mean, that's a reasonable cause by any measure. So when we really dug into it, while it was a slightly less exciting explanation, what we found is that this happened because of a perfect storm of kind of leadership failures and underfunding of public health.

So the leadership failures came on a number of levels. The commissioner of Philadelphia's health department was found later in an inspector general's report to be deeply disconnected from the decisions being made that slowly elevated this group to power. I don't know when the first conversations were about having them manage vaccination clinics. So that was some of it. I cannot provide that information today. I want to know as much as you do. But I think you also have to look at the bigger picture, which is that there was a system where somebody, whether it was the health commissioner or somebody he delegated to, was making these sort of split-second decisions in the pressure cooker of a crisis like this to begin with.

And the way you get there, the way you get to a situation like that is from chronic underfunding of public health. How could Philadelphia underfund vaccinations? I mean, it's like a big, blue, major American metropolis. Right. I mean, the city knew that vaccines were coming for months. Why didn't they have a distribution plan earlier on? The answer to that is a nationwide problem. Public health departments across the country have been systematically underfunded for the past decade. Since 2010, per-person spending for state health departments dropped by 16 percent,

and for local health departments by 18 percent. What that means is that even when these big influxes of cash come during a national emergency or something like that, if the capacity isn't there in the department to be able to use that funding in a helpful way, you have to outsource because you don't have enough people. You don't have enough staff. What public health advocates say is that what you need to really prepare for a crisis is you need consistent, sustainable public funding for public health departments. It's like learning how to be a flight attendant and doing the drills for the crashes. I talked to the University of Pennsylvania

public health researcher, Alison Buttenheim, and she made this comparison to the airline industry. Like, you want your flight attendants to have practiced an emergency before they get on the plane, and we should expect the same of public health. You know, the reason flight attendants and flight crews get us through those things is they've, like, literally walked through it.

They have muscle memory and they have, you know, very clear cues that remind them, like, I do this, this, and this now, even though my brain is, like, you know, firing crazy stuff. We have to practice public health emergencies and our responses to them, or we'll be slow and we'll be biased in the response. Even so, this is a city with a bunch of reputable universities. Could they really not have done better than this 22-year-old Andre Deroshan? Yeah, and a lot of the volunteers and community advocates that we talked to on the ground who had partnered with Philly Fighting COVID to do testing and who were really relying on them to provide services felt really burned that the city made that decision. I mean, they trusted that the city picked Philly Fighting COVID because they were the best option.

And so they got into bed with them because they figured they were reliable. It just seemed like a great fit. In retrospect, there were things that I missed, but they said all the right things. We talked to one community advocate, Syria Rivera. She works with a community center in a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood in Philadelphia. And, you know, she described how she felt like Philly Fighting COVID said all the right things to her organization to try to help. But then they were unreliable. They didn't show up half the time. Five minutes before they were supposed to be here, I get a message like, sorry, we can't make it today. That was it. That was the conversation.

She really felt like they were using her group to be able to say, oh, we partnered with communities of color. We, you know, did all the right things. You should pick us to be the vaccine provider. And they got this opportunity, you know, on the backs of her community. They used our logo, basically our name, and the relationship we've built with their community to say, yeah, we did that. But they didn't do anything. And, you know, it's people like Syria that have had to do the work of rebuilding that trust with Black and Latino communities across Philadelphia. You know, Andre's not doing that work.

The health commissioner resigned. He's not doing that work. So it's the people in these community groups who are doing the work of rebuilding that trust, even though they were the ones who were betrayed to begin with. Not to mention this could have increased vaccine skepticism among, you know, an already skeptical segment of the population. Do you have any idea if this made people more reluctant to get the shot in the city or the state? It's hard to draw a direct line from the Philly fighting COVID scandal to, you know, people who are feeling hesitant about getting vaccinated now. But what I think you can say on a broader level

is that people rely on their public health agencies and just on government agencies in general to provide them with services and follow through. And when they screw up, the more they screw up, the less confidence people have in those agencies and in the healthcare system as a whole. A lot of people are probably harboring false beliefs about the vaccine efficacy or safety, and they're doing that on their own accord. But for some of them,

it's probably because they've seen stuff like what happened with Philly fighting COVID and they say, well, that seems like a sham. And so the more real shams you see, the easier it is to believe that nothing's to be trusted. Nina Feldman is a reporter at WHYY Public Radio in Philadelphia. She hosts a five-part podcast on this very saga. It's out in the world right now. It's called Half-Vaxxed. Vaxxed, like V-A-X-X-E-D. Half-Vaxxed.

You can get all the juicy details we couldn't fit into this episode there. We used music from Half-Vaxxed in our episode today. It was composed by Max Marin. Our episode was produced by Miles Bryan. And a little disclosure, Miles is in a long-term relationship with WHYY reporter Nina Feldman. In fact, they just got engaged. Mazel tov. I'm Sean Ramos. We're off Monday

for Indigenous Peoples Day, back Tuesday with more Today Explained. you