Baptist Health silent on report saying it put donors in front of COVID vaccine line
During a time when many seniors were battling to get a vaccine appointment, South Florida’s largest not-for-profit hospital system, Baptist Health of South Florida, ushered COVID-19 vaccines to its top donors before offering them to the public.
The CEO of Baptist Health’s fund-raising foundation, Alexandra Villoch, emailed more than 3,000 wealthy Baptist donors on New Year’s Day offering up the sought-after vaccines, about a week before Baptist launched a website for the general public to secure vaccine appointments.
The email, which was first reported by Politico, advertised the vaccine in what it described as an expansion of “immunization efforts to include broader community members related to Baptist Health, such as our Giving Society members who meet the designated criteria.”
The email went on to list qualifying criteria such as smoking habits — decidedly more lenient than most of the medical conditions enumerated to get a vaccine at that time, such as being treated for cancer.
Neither Baptist Health nor Villoch, a former publisher of the Miami Herald, responded to multiple requests for comment from the Herald.
During a period when seniors couldn’t get appointments
The first-class access offered to hospital donors at the outset of January came during a time when more vulnerable seniors could not schedule appointments to get the coveted vaccines.
The timeline of the email to Giving Society donors contradicts emailed statements and interviews from Baptist Health officials with the Herald from late December and early January. That was the period leading up to the hospital system’s botched attempt to schedule vaccine appointments with the greater public, an effort that ended in a rash of canceled appointments and an aborted vaccination site in Doral.
Around Christmas time, after the health system had made considerable progress vaccinating its employees and about a week before the email to donors was sent out, Baptist Health chief pharmacy officer Madeline Camejo told the Herald it had not yet reached out to patients under its care who qualify for the vaccine, but was considering doing so before attempting to vaccinate the public.
“We’re looking at what is our own population at Baptist that qualify, our own patients that qualify in [the governor’s December executive order] on vaccines,” Camejo said at the time. “I think that’s an easier place for us to start, but the plans haven’t been formalized yet.”
In a Jan. 7 Herald article about hospitals giving preference to their well-heeled donors, a Baptist spokesman confirmed that it had been vaccinating front-line personnel and “reaching out to eligible, high-risk members of the Baptist Health community.’’
The Baptist spokesman also said the general public was not able to make appointments at that time.
The next day, Jan. 8, about a week after the email to donors, Baptist launched an online appointment scheduling platform for those 65 and older and “for eligible, high-risk members of the community to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”
It listed qualifying conditions on its website such as cancer, chronic kidney disease and heart conditions.
On Jan. 19, Baptist sent out text messages to those who had a confirmed appointment saying it was canceling all vaccine appointments from Jan. 20 going forward, except for those who had received a first dose from Baptist.
Ocean Reef controversy over COVID vaccines
Baptist was similarly implicated in a controversy over early access to the vaccines in Ocean Reef, a wealthy gated enclave in the Florida Keys where nearly all the residents 65 and older had been vaccinated by mid-January, according to an emailed newsletter obtained by the Herald.
Gov. Ron DeSantis denied having any involvement with the vaccine distribution at the Medical Center at Ocean Reef and said the vaccinations were handled by a “South Florida hospital,” which later was identified as Baptist Health South Florida.
Baptist and Monroe County contradicted DeSantis’ claims, saying the distribution was authorized by the state.
Eric Toner, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that vaccinating donors was not what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intended when it offered guidelines to hospitals on how to use their doses.
“On the other hand, I know that big donors to hospitals get special privileges. That is not new,” Toner said. “They are treated as VIPs if they need to come to the hospital. The administrators bend over backwards to make sure that they have a good experience, that is a fact and it happens everywhere. I don’t think it’s defensible, but it is a fact. And so I’m disappointed but not surprised by it. In terms of what can be done about it, I don’t really know.”
Toner said that ideally, the state would have had more oversight on what hospitals were doing with their doses in early January, but the health and emergency officials handling the vaccine rollout were already stretched thinly.
“They just didn’t have the manpower,” Toner said. “They were struggling just to get the vaccines out and get them to the hospitals and get guidance to the hospitals on what they should do.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
