FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — As Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick began self-funding her successful 2021 congressional campaign, the company where she was CEO at the time started receiving a new source of income: providing COVID vaccines in underserved communities.
Five contracts listed on a state database show Trinity Health Care Services of Miramar was paid almost $8.1 million for its vaccine work.
The records don’t show how much it cost Trinity to fulfill its obligations under the contracts, and how much was profit for the family-owned company.
“During the pandemic we risked our lives to serve the community,” Cherfilus-McCormick said Friday by email, citing persistent shortages in masks and personal protective equipment at the time. Yet, she said, “we woke up every day to vaccinate people.”
“I personally traveled city to city to hire, train, and check staff into the tent before they started work. I lived in hotels for five months getting my team ready,” she said.
The existence of the contracts received limited media attention last year. This week, with less than 10 weeks to go until the August 2022 primary — in which Cherfilus-McCormick faces the opponent she narrowly defeated in last year’s special primary on the way to becoming the district’s new member of Congress — the website Florida Politics highlighted the issue.
Charly Norton, a spokeswoman for challenger Dale Holness’s campaign, said Friday by text message that “at the very least, the state ought to conduct an audit if not an outright investigation.”
Vaccine work
Early in 2021, there was a frenzy to get vaccines in arms, and the federal government provided funding to states to make that happen. Florida’s allocation flowed through the state Division of Emergency Management.
There was also significant political pressure — especially from Democrats — to push for vaccines to be available in minority and low-income communities, where some residents didn’t have cars to drive to mass vaccination sites, and others had a difficult time arranging for time off work to get shots.
Early on, Cherfilus-McCormick said, “minorities were not getting vaccinated.” Trinity hired African American, Caribbean American and Hispanic health care professionals “to educate the communities they lived in” and encourage vaccination.
Trinity provided nurse practitioners, registered nurses, nursing assistance — paying from $20 to $100 an hour — and provided coordination for Federal Emergency Management Agency sites in Miami, Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa, she said.
Working with FEMA, Cherfilus-McCormick said, “we hired staff from minority areas, worked with minority staffing companies and had them educate minority communities about the vaccine and schedule appointments to take the vaccine.”
Cherfilus-McCormick called the effort to provide aid “the proudest moment in my career.”
Her company also provided staff for mobile sites operated at churches and hired teens in foster care who were about to age out of the system.
“During the COVID-19 activation, the state’s biggest priority was securing as many resources as possible to assist communities responding to COVID-19,” the state Division of Emergency Management said in a statement provided by spokeswoman Alecia Collins. Under the COVID-19 state of emergency in effect at the time, the agency “was authorized to waive procurement rules and contracted with vendors that could provide services as quickly and as cost-efficient as possible. ... Vendors were selected based on if they could provide equipment and services that supported Florida’s response to COVID-19.”
Contract award
The state contract-tracking website doesn’t show when Trinity’s work started, though the purchase orders are April 2, April 7, two on May 11, and June 17, all in 2021. One shows that work appears to have started weeks before the date on the purchase order.
The work started much earlier, Cherfilus-McCormick said.
She and a group of other Black women whose businesses were working on vaccination efforts had to put in $100,000 to $200,000 each to cover payroll for employees from February through May because banks wouldn’t provide loans.
Cherfilus-McCormick said Trinity received the contract after she and the other Black women wrote to state and federal agencies “pointing out that these efforts must include minority businesses in order for the project to be successful.”
Four other Black-owned businesses also received contracts, she said.
The state website lists the “Executive Office of the Governor” as the agency responsible for the contracts. Florida law places the Division of Emergency Management, which was in charge of COVID-19, under the governor’s office.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said by email that “the governor was not involved in selecting vendors or negotiating contracts.”
The Division of Emergency Management statement also said DeSantis’ office “does not play a role in the selection of the Division’s vendors.”
Cherfilus-McCormick, an outspoken critic of the Republican governor before she was elected and since, said it was absurd to think he would take action to help her.
“The idea that the governor would want me in Congress is ridiculous,” she said.
Congressional campaign
As the vaccine work abated, Cherfilus-McCormick spent much of 2021 running for Congress — and spending heavily on her campaign.
From Jan. 1, 2021, through March 31 of this year, Federal Election Commission filings show Cherfilus-McCormick’s campaign spent $2.9 million of money from the candidate.
Most of the money was spent on the 2021 special primary election to pick a Democratic nominee to fill the vacancy left by the death of longtime Congressman Alcee Hastings in the Broward-Palm Beach county 20th Congressional District, allowing her to outspend the other candidates.
Some spending was devoted to the Jan. 11 special general election and some toward her 2022 reelection campaign.
During the 15 months covered by the filings, Cherfilus-McCormick loaned her campaign $6,586,765 and it repaid her $2,019,569. As of March 31, her campaign fund had a balance of $1,675,609 making the net amount she put to her campaign fund $2.9 million.
Her self-funding was widely reported in the lead-up to the special primary election in November and the special general election in January.
She had run — challenging Hastings in the 2018 and 2020 primaries — but had never held elective office before.
In January 2021, she filed paperwork declaring her intention to run again. She was among several candidates, including Holness, who announced or started mapping out their candidacies before Hastings died in April 2021. His declining health from pancreatic cancer was well known.
Personal finances
Although the loans to her campaign, and occupation as Trinity CEO — she’s also a lawyer but doesn’t practice — were widely publicized, details of her personal finances weren’t known before the primary.
The Ethics in Government Act requires candidates for federal office to file financial disclosure reports once they raise or spend $5,000, a threshold Cherfilus-McCormick met by late spring or early summer 2021.
Many candidates never file. In the hotly contested primary for the 20th District, three of the six leading candidates filed reports before the primary and three, including Cherfilus-McCormick, didn’t. Her closest competitor, Holness, didn’t file his report until months after reaching the $5,000 threshold.
In December, between the Nov. 2 primary and the Jan. 11 special general election, she filed a financial disclosure reporting more than $6.4 million in income in 2021, an increase from 2020, when she reported earning $86,000.
Her biggest source of 2021 income was from SCM Consulting Group, a limited liability company for which she reported $5.7 million in consulting and profit sharing fees for work at Trinity Health Care.
Rematch
Cherfilus-McCormick defeated Holness by five votes out of 49,082 cast in the 11-candidate field in the special primary election, which was finalized after a drawn-out recount. The district is so Democratic that the party’s nomination was a virtual guarantee of victory in the Jan. 11 special election.
Holness immediately began running again. He is a former Broward County commissioner — a position he had to resign from in order to run for the congressional seat last year.
State Rep. Anika Omphroy, who represents a central Broward district, is also seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress. Her campaign didn’t immediately respond to voice and email messages Friday.
Website article
An article published this week by the Florida Politics website, written by its publisher, Peter Schorsch, was sharply critical of the contract award to Cherfilus-McCormick’s firm.
In a letter dated Thursday, Michael Pizzi, an attorney for Cherfilus-McCormick, wrote to Schorsch demanding a retraction of the article.
Schorsch said Friday via email that he hasn’t received the formal notice from Pizzi “so it is premature for me to comment. Also, Mr. Pizzi presupposes, incorrectly, that Florida Politics and me as its publisher are not media. We are and this entitles us to certain protections. Once I receive Mr. Pizzi’s letter and after I have my attorney review its claims, I will attempt to offer more insight about the story.”
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