BY JOEY SWEENEY | New Philadelphia, we now know, was always a scam. It was only ever a slapdash rebrand, just some grey facade and reclaimed wood slapped over all the things that have made this place infuriating since before we were born. New Philadelphia doesn’t bury any of this, it just turns it into an ambient smell that won’t wash out. 

It follows, then, that scams invite scammers. Scammers who may happen to have the veneer of the new, but plug right in to all the old bullshit. (Which is most often just a shift in style of whiteness, from, say, Dunkin’ creamer to flat white.)

This is essentially the story that the WHYY podcast Half Vaxxed tells — with a full squad of reporters and witnesses alike — and it’s one of the better tellings of this particular type of tale that has been repeating in Philadelphia for nearly all of modern memory. 

If you were alive and trying to stay alive in Philadelphia a year ago, you probably already know the broad strokes: Philly Fighting COVID, led up by the now infamous Andrei Doroshin, was a non-profit that came literally out of nowhere, somehow got contracted by the city despite no previous experience in public health and, at first, made good (not great) strides initially in getting folks vaccinated here and there around the city. But when vaccines came on the scene, PFC quickly and disastrously pivoted, their implosion happening in real time on Philly Twitter and then all over local and then national media.

At the time, though, Philly Fighting COVID became such a wild and wooly story, occurring in a moment of real and justified panic all over the country if not the world, that a lot of it went unreported or unnoticed. 

Half Vaxxed does a fantastic job at filling in the gaps, and then some. Doroshin is a character for the ages: We hear about the ego, the incompetence, the willful fuckery, the strange business doings (by city and client alike) and not least, the real danger of the moment this was happening in. Throughout, there’s also a sense of random-ness — the good, bad and dumb luck that seems to constantly drive the turns of the story.  Often, the voices on the show — reporter and interviewees alike — sound like they can’t even quite believe the things they’re talking about, that they were ever even in a situation where any of this could happen. But they know them to be so.

There’s a kind of candor, too, especially coming from those who’ve spoken up who were at the ground level of what was happening with Philly Fighting COVID, that is a pretty rare thing to behold: You hear the regret, the helplessness, the anger, and unfortunately, a sense of not quite shame, but just a bitter feeling that they’d ever been a quarter to any of this nonsense in the first place. 

If that’s not Philly, I don’t know what is.