November 3, 2024

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Health's Like Heaven.

One Medical gave ineligible people the COVID-19 vaccine

San Francisco-based health care provider One Medical has come under fire in California, Oregon and Washington for allegedly inoculating young, healthy people who were ineligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, including friends and family of company leadership, and skipped the line ahead of high-risk patients, according to an investigation by NPR.

One Medical offered the vaccine to all of its San Francisco County staff members, regardless of whether they saw patients in person, according to NPR.

“Further, patients of One Medical who were ineligible to be vaccinated based on local guidelines were permitted to book vaccination appointments through an online portal,” NPR said. “So was at least one executive of a partner organization with One Medical. Internal communications show providers trying to get eligible health care workers vaccinated but instead being told to put them on a waitlist.”

One Medical is a health care provider known for its personalized “concierge service” that accepts a variety of insurance 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 One Medical offices in the city and asked the provider to return 1,600 vaccine doses. “Although your response lists 984 of these doses for walk-in from DPH and the remaining 636 doses for an ‘Oracle Park mass vaccination launch,’ neither of those uses is authorized by DPH at this time,” the department wrote in a letter to One Medical that was shared with ABC 7.

The department is allowing One Medical to administer all second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients who are awaiting their final inoculation.

The letter also said the department will be in touch with One Medical “if we are ready to allocate additional doses to One Medical for administration at a future date.”

KCBS Radio reported that Alameda County also suspended its supplies to One Medical and Washington state pulled its vaccine supplies from the provider offices in the state.

One Medical released a statement in response to the NPR report. “Any assertions that we broadly and knowingly disregard eligibility guidelines are in direct contradiction to our actual approach to vaccine administration,” the statement read. “We have numerous checkpoints in place — online at the time of appointment booking, prior to the appointment via a labor-intensive ‘schedule scanning’ process, and in-person verification at the point of care as needed– to mitigate abuse of our vaccine booking system. We routinely turn people away who do not meet eligibility criteria. Our data currently shows nationally 96% of individuals vaccinated by One Medical have eligibility documentation and the remaining 4% generally were vaccinated in accordance with zero wastage protocols.”

The San Francisco Department of Public Health, the Alameda County Health Department and the California Department of Public Health didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on this story. The story will be updated upon hearing back.



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