Not many people had heard of an Anchorage company called WEKA before it set up shop at a makeshift clinic in a former hotel owned by the city last fall, administering a coronavirus treatment called monoclonal antibodies at the height of a crushing pandemic surge.
Until then, the private security and transport company, owned by Todd and Crystal Herring, had operated largely behind the scenes, escorting mental health patients around Alaska and providing security to hospitals and other facilities.
That changed last October, when Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson made WEKA an offer: A rent-free space to give monoclonal antibody infusions to the public.
At the time, Alaska was in crisis: Hospitals were filled with coronavirus patients, most of them unvaccinated. Public health officials touted monoclonal antibody infusions as a way to prevent severe disease. In Alaska and nationally, the treatment gained acceptance even among vaccine skeptics, and demand soared.
It was during those weeks that WEKA moved into the city-owned former Golden Lion hotel in Midtown Anchorage and, once it became clear that the company owners had also been significant donors to the Bronson’s campaign for mayor, into a spotlight of scrutiny that only intensified when the clinic began asking sick patients for a $550 upfront fee to receive a life-saving coronavirus treatment another clinic was giving away for free.
Even after the WEKA clinic shut down in March as demand for the treatment waned, questions lingered. In recent weeks they’ve multiplied as patients have come forward to describe puzzling experiences and unexpected bills. Their stories have raised further questions about the clinic’s competency, its medical oversight and whether the treatments were effective. In at least one case, the clinic administered a treatment to a man using the wrong method, one that had not been approved by the FDA for that medicine.
Many of the questions posed by members of the public and Anchorage Assembly leadership boiled down to one central concern. As Assembly chair Suzanne LaFrance put it in a statement after receiving documents from the administration detailing the city’s deal with WEKA: “Why would the (municipality) subsidize a for-profit organization that appears to have charged residents … premium rates for services?”
The co-owner of WEKA says the public is missing important context about how the Golden Lion clinic came to be, how it operated and who benefited from it.
“To view the provision of a large scale, potentially life-saving treatment during the height of the Delta variant surge … in a cooperative agreement between the municipality and private enterprise (which, to date, has operated at a loss) as a ‘sweetheart deal’ rather than an attempt to fill an urgent need in the community, requires a very narrow perspective and clearly does not stand up to scrutiny,” co-owner Crystal Herring wrote in an email last week.
The city did not answer specific questions posed about WEKA’s operations at the Golden Lion site, offering a written statement instead.
“We offered a location to provide life-saving treatment, vaccines, and testing to residents during a pandemic in a state of emergency,” Bronson administration spokesman Corey Young wrote in a statement Thursday. “Without this option, more Anchorage residents would have died of COVID-19.”
WEKA co-owner Crystal Herring spoke three times to the Daily News over a period of months about the clinic’s operations, twice answering detailed questions by email and once in a phone interview. After examining public records, interviewing former patients and officials, and posing questions to Herring and city officials, here’s what we know.
‘This is what saved my life’
WEKA began as a medical transport and security company. Todd Herring, a former correctional…
Read More: Anchorage COVID-19 clinic that operated out of former hotel faces scrutiny