San Francisco-based health care provider One Medical has come under fire in California, Oregon and Washington for allegedly vaccinating young, healthy people who were not eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, including friends and family of business leaders. and skipped the line for high-risk patients, according to research by NPR.
According to NPR, One Medical offered the vaccine to all of its San Francisco County employees, regardless of whether they saw the patients in person.
“In addition, according to local guidelines, One Medical patients who were not eligible for vaccination were allowed to make vaccination appointments through an online portal,” said NPR. “So did at least one executive from a partner organization with One Medical. Internal communications indicate that providers are trying to get eligible health professionals vaccinated, but are instead being told to put them on a waiting list.”
One Medical is a healthcare provider known for its personal “concierge service” that accepts a variety of insurance plans and costs $ 199 annually to join. They have offices in a dozen cities and several in San Francisco.
As a result of the alleged misconduct, the San Francisco Department of Public Health stopped allocating vaccines to the One Medical offices in the city and asked the provider to return 1,600 vaccine doses. “Although your answer lists 984 of these doses for DPH walk-in and the remaining 636 doses for an ‘Oracle Park Mass Vaccine Launch,’ none of these uses are currently authorized by DPH,” the department wrote in a letter to One Medical that was shared with ABC 7
The department allows One Medical to administer all second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients awaiting their final inoculation.
The letter also stated that the department will contact One Medical “when we are ready to assign additional doses to One Medical for administration at a future date.”
KCBS Radio reported that Alameda County also stopped its supplies to One Medical and that Washington State was pulling its vaccine deliveries from the state’s supplier offices.
One Medical has released a statement following the NPR report. “Any claims that we generally and knowingly ignore the authorization guidelines are in direct contradiction to our actual approach to vaccine administration,” the statement said. “We have numerous checkpoints – online at the time of booking an appointment, prior to the appointment through a labor-intensive ‘schedule scanning’ process, and personal verification at the point of care if required – to prevent misuse of our vaccine booking system. people who do not meet the eligibility criteria Our data currently shows that nationally 96% of individuals vaccinated by One Medical have eligibility documentation and the remaining 4% are generally vaccinated in accordance with zero-waste protocols. “
The San Francisco Department of Public Health, the Alameda County Health Department, and the California Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story. The story will be updated as soon as we hear it.