By Steve Moran

Before the management fee scandal, there was another MorseLife story that is, if anything, harder to explain, harder to justify.

On December 31, 2020, in the earliest and scarcest days of the COVID vaccine rollout, MorseLife held a vaccination clinic through a federal program that was created specifically to protect nursing home residents and staff. Older people were, at that moment in time, among the people most likely to die from the virus.

Vaccine doses were treated like gold

According to the Department of Justice, 976 people were vaccinated at that clinic. More than half, 567 people, were not eligible under the program. This wasn’t a handful of leftover doses at the end of the day. 

The DOJ alleged MorseLife’s fundraising arm was directed to invite donors and prospective donors. They further alleged the board’s vice chairman and his brother, widely understood to be David and William Mack, were allowed to bring in roughly 290 people with no prior connection to MorseLife, many from the same country club, some of whom reportedly flew to Florida specifically for the shot.

Documents

The documents … The DOJ released contemporaneous communications it attributed to MorseLife leadership.

In one, Myers is said to have encouraged the Foundation to focus on getting the wealthiest people vaccinated and to think about what gifts might follow.

In another, he allegedly told an ineligible person MorseLife would simply make them an “employee” so they could qualify for a shot.

A MorseLife Foundation strategy document reportedly described vaccine recipients as prospective donors who felt a sense of allegiance to the people who arranged their vaccination, and discussed using that goodwill to solicit major gifts.

The Aftermath …

MorseLife, the institution, paid $1.75 million in 2022 to settle the federal False Claims Act allegations, without admitting liability. In September 2025, Myers personally signed a separate $250,000 settlement with the HHS Office of Inspector General resolving allegations that he personally caused MorseLife to request federally funded vaccines for people who weren’t eligible. 

According to Myers’s own account of the matter, MorseLife had agreed to indemnify him for that settlement, and it was ultimately paid through the organization’s D&O insurance carrier, not out of his own pocket. Neither David nor William Mack appears to have personally paid anything toward either settlement.

I want to be very careful here. Settling a civil claim isn’t a conviction, and MorseLife has denied wrongdoing.

But it’s hard to read the texts the DOJ released and land anywhere other than this: access to a genuinely scarce, life-saving resource was, at least in part, treated as a donor-cultivation opportunity.

If Myers’s lawsuit wants to frame him as scapegoated for something engineered entirely by the Macks, those contemporaneous texts, in his own words, are the hardest evidence for that framing to get around.

The Same Question, Twice

What strikes me is that both scandals, five years apart, come back to something close to the same failure. Someone in a position of trust and expertise did something that benefited the organization or benefited them personally, and nobody with the standing to stop it did so, or stopped it only partway.

With the vaccines, it seems to have been treated less as an ethical question and more as a logistics and fundraising opportunity. Who was in the room asking whether it was right to vaccinate 290 country club members while frontline caregivers elsewhere were still waiting? 

Did the board know the scale of what was happening in real time, or only after DOJ came asking questions?

With Amplifii, it’s more complicated, as I laid out in Part 1. The board did real diligence. What it didn’t do, as far as anyone can tell, is verify the one fact everything else depended on.

Part 3 gets into what’s happened since both scandals became public, including a conversation I had directly with Keith Myers’s attorney, and a new detail that complicates the board’s account of how satisfied it really was.