Founder of Philly Fighting COVID agrees to destroy personal health data collected during clinic debacle

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Andrei Doroshin

PHILADELPHIA - A graduate student in psychology whose COVID-19 vaccine operation got shut down by Philadelphia last year has settled with the state attorney general's office and agreed to destroy all personal health information his start-up gathered.

The agreement was filed Friday in Commonwealth Court and requires a judge's approval to take effect.

Central to the accusations against Andrei Doroshin, who had almost no public health experience when the city gave him the task, was that he had intended to profit from the vaccine operation run by his start-up, called Philly Fighting COVID.

Philly Fighting COVID was a mistake, Kenney says

Mayor Jim Kenney says Philly Fighting COVID was a mistake after the Inspector General found no malice, no ill-intent, and no one seeking personal gain.

Doroshin denied the allegations by the attorney general's office, including violating the state's nonprofit corporation law.

Under the agreement, Doroshin and his associates are barred from managing charitable assets or soliciting charitable donations in Pennsylvania for 10 years.

Doroshin also must destroy the personal health information gathered through the vaccine pre-registration service and is barred from receiving any financial benefit from the information or the vaccine.

Doroshin must also dissolve Philly Fighting COVID.

City officials said they gave him the job because he and his friends had organized one of the community groups that set up COVID-19 testing sites throughout the city in 2020.

But they shut the vaccine operation down once they learned that Doroshin had switched his privacy notice to potentially sell patient data. He called it a glitch that he quickly fixed.