A Texas doctor had a grim choice one night in late December. The remaining doses in a vial of COVID-19 vaccine would spoil within hours unless injected into willing patients, but Dr. Hasan Gokal couldn’t find enough of it. Rather than throwing them out, Gokal traveled around his community gathering enough people who were willing to take the vaccines before they expired. With just minutes to go and no one else to hand, Gokal gave the last dose to his wife.
Is Gokal a hero who makes sure that these doses lead to vaccinations, spurring efforts to reduce community transmission? Or is Gokal a thief, and worse, a criminal against “equality”?
The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on this late December evening, he had to find 10 eligible people for the remaining doses before the precious drug expired. In six hours.
The doctor scrambled, called home visits, and sent people to his home outside of Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bedridden non-American. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.
After midnight, and a few minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a lung disease that makes her short of breath.
Because of his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and then charged with stealing 10 doses of vaccine worth a total of $ 135 – an avoidable crime that sent his name and mugshot flying around the world.
Ahsome may think, the dose given to his wife is what the authorities took. However, Gokal’s wife has severe chronic lung dysfunction and could have qualified by federal standards at the time to receive the injection. However, that was not the problem that lured Gokal’s employer. Instead, it was Gokal’s lack of focus on “ equality ” that tipped the scale and led to his dismissal, at least according to Gokal’s testimony:
Several days later, the doctor said, that supervisor and the human resources director called him to ask if he had administered 10 doses outside of the scheduled December 29 event. He said that, in accordance with the guidelines, he shouldn’t waste the vaccine – and was promptly fired.
Officials insisted that he violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown away, the doctor recalled. He also said one of the officials scared him by questioning the lack of “equality” among those he vaccinated.
“Are you suggesting there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
This was – and still is – exactly the problem with the rollout of vaccines. Civil servants inside and outside the government have focused so much on “equality issues” that they would rather do so vaccine doses than allow them in willing arms. It’s not that equality issues don’t matter at all, but a deadly pandemic needs vaccinations to take place as widely and quickly as possible. Every dose lost is another person who can still spread the virus – and produce mutations from it that could make the pandemic worse.
Rather than praising Gokal’s dexterity in making sure no dose is wasted, his employer canned him, and Harris County prosecutors charged him with theft. A judge dismissed the charge, writing that he “emphatically rejects” the idea of theft in the context of a doctor vaccinating people in the midst of a public health emergency. Nevertheless, the prosecutors decided to take the case to the grand jury to see if they could recover the theft charges against Gokal.
One has to wonder, however, what another judge will do with the case, even with a bill before the grand jury, after Judge Franklin Bynum first reprimands prosecutors. Hopefully the judge also realizes that this clown show is only one car too short. Gokal needs to be restored and thank you, not expelled from his profession for making sure the doses of COVID-19 vaccines are not wasted. And you have to wonder how many doses are still to be spoiled to this day because of the spectacle of this prosecution of Gokal because he is just doing his job.