Before the issue exploded into public sight this week, however, few councilmembers seemed aware of the situation brewing behind closed doors.
Now, many are sounding the alarm.
“I could not help but wonder, as all my church mothers used to say, how they got over,” Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson said Thursday. “How did a group led by college students, with no medical experience and no track record of providing medical services anywhere, get the responsibility of overseeing a part of our city’s vaccine distribution?”
City Council has clashed with the health department in the past over funding for the Black Doctor’s COVID-19 Consortium, another startup group whose volunteers had for months been going into neighborhoods to get testing hard-hit communities.
That group, which has now been allotted some vaccines, also wondered why they were not tapped to help a mass-testing site.
“I’m not sure why they went to [PFC],” said Dr. Ala Stanford of the Black Doctors Consortium last week. “We could have done what they did. We would have been the logical choice to ask. Haven’t we proven ourselves?”