The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired.

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The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on this late December night, he had to find 10 eligible people for its remaining doses before the precious medicine expired. In six hours.

Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.

After midnight, and with just minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.

For his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and then charged with stealing 10 vaccine doses worth a total of $135 — a shun-worthy misdemeanor that sent his name and mug shot rocketing around the globe.

Late last month, a judge dismissed the charge as groundless, after which the local district attorney vowed to present the matter to a grand jury. And while prosecutors portray the doctor as a cold opportunist, his lawyer says he acted responsibly — even heroically.

“Everybody was looking at this guy and saying, ‘I got my mother waiting for a vaccine, my grandfather waiting for a vaccine,’” the lawyer, Paul Doyle, said. “They were thinking, ‘This guy is a villain.’”

Dr. Gokal, 48, immigrated from Pakistan as a boy and earned a medical degree at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. After working at hospitals in Central New York, he moved to Texas in 2009 to oversee the emergency department at a suburban Houston hospital. His volunteer work has included rebuilding homes and providing medical care after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Fortunately, he said, the Harris County Public Health department recruited him in April to become the medical director for its Covid-response team. The job paid less, but he was eager to protect his wife by limiting his exposure to the coronavirus in emergency rooms.

On Dec. 22, Dr. Gokal joined a conference call in which state health officials explained the protocols for administering the recently approved Moderna vaccine. The 10 or 11 doses in a vial are viable for six hours after the seal is punctured.

Dr. Gokal said the advice was to vaccinate people eligible under the 1(a) category (health care workers and residents in long-term-care facilities), then those under the 1(b) category (people over 65 or with a health condition that increases risk of severe Covid-related illness).

After that, he said, the message was: “Just put it in people’s arms. We don’t want any doses to go to waste. Period.”

Around 6:45 at night, as the event wound down, an eligible person arrived for a shot. A nurse punctured a new vial to administer the vaccine, which activated the six-hour time limit for the 10 remaining doses.

The chances of 10 eligible people suddenly showing up were slim

Dr. Gokal said he called a Harris County public health official in charge of operations to report his plans to find 10 people to receive the remaining doses. He said he was told, simply: OK.

He said he then called another high-ranking colleague whose parents and in-laws were eligible for the vaccine. They weren’t available.

The hours were counting down.

The doctor figured that if he returned the open vial to his department’s almost certainly empty office at this late hour, it would go to waste. So as he started the drive to his home in a neighboring county, he said, he called people in his cellphone’s contact list to ask whether they had older relatives or neighbors needing to be immunized.

He said his hesitant wife asked whether it was the right thing to do. “It makes perfect sense,” he said he answered. “We don’t want any doses wasted, period.”

With 15 minutes to spare, Dr. Gokal gave his wife the last Moderna dose.

The next morning, he said, he submitted the paperwork for the 10 people he had vaccinated the previous night, including his wife. He said he also informed his supervisor and colleagues of what he had done, and why.

Several days later, the doctor said, that supervisor and the human resources director summoned him to ask whether he had administered 10 doses outside of the scheduled event on Dec. 29. He said he had, in keeping with guidelines not to waste the vaccine — and was promptly fired.

The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those he had vaccinated.

Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.

Exactly, he said he was told.

On Jan. 21, about two weeks after the doctor’s termination, a friend called to say that a local reporter had just tweeted about him. At that very moment, one of his three children answered the door to bright lights and a thrust microphone. Shaken, the 16-year-old boy closed the door and said, “Dad, there are people out there with cameras.”

This was how Dr. Gokal learned that he had been charged with stealing vaccine doses.

Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, had just issued a news release that afternoon with the headline: “Fired Harris County Health Doctor Charged With Stealing Vial Of Covid-19 Vaccine.”

It alleged that Dr. Gokal “stole the vial” and disregarded county protocols to ensure that vaccines are not wasted and are administered to eligible people on a waiting list. “He abused his position to place his friends and family in line in front of people who had gone through the lawful process to be there,” Ms. Ogg said.

Days later, a criminal court judge, Franklin Bynum, dismissed the case for lack of probable cause.

“In the number of words usually taken to describe an allegation of retail shoplifting, the State attempts, for the first time, to criminalize a doctor’s documented administration of vaccine doses during a public health emergency,” he wrote. “The Court emphatically rejects this attempted imposition of the criminal law on the professional decisions of a physician.”

Both the Texas Medical Association and the Harris County Medical Society recently issued a statement of support for physicians like Dr. Gokal who find themselves scrambling “to avoid wasting the vaccine in a punctured vial.”

“It is difficult to understand any justification for charging any well-intentioned physician in this situation with a criminal offense,” the statement said.

There is something very wrong where giving vaccinations to people who want\need them is seen as worse than throwing out the unused doses...Even worse when someone is charged for doing so, and compounded by a prosecutor pushing to present it to a "Grand Jury" when a judge had dismissed the charges as groundless. The fact that the doctor's race was a motivating reason for their being charged also doesn't help matters.

Out of curiosity, do you know if Kim Ogg is an "elected" District Attorney, or one who is appointed (I imagine an "elected" one would be more likely to be pushing so hard for charges for "political" reasons, as opposed to one who is merely appointed, and therefore less likely to have a motiviation to push charges in a case such as this).

Reelected last November.

Just out of curiosity are you familiar with Matthew 7:5 in the King James?
it might educate you about the wisdom of looking for specks of dust in people's eyes

I side with Dr. Gokal 100%. Glad it got thrown out of court.

Late last month, a judge dismissed the charge as groundless, after which the local district attorney vowed to present the matter to a grand jury. And while prosecutors portray the doctor as a cold opportunist, his lawyer says he acted responsibly — even heroically.

Of course, none of these actually answer the question regarding the District Attorney's party affiliation...

It was thrown out, but I'm not sure whether the elected DA has taken to it a grand jury as was threatened...I'd like to think they would reject charges, but if they are people who are willing to vote in someone like that as DA, it doesn't necessarily follow that they will reject further charges...

Kim Ogg is a Democrat. District Attorney tends not to be a political position and so party affiliation is not given in the title like for senators, which are political appointments.

Was this an another incident of wokeness gone wild? I was directed to this story on that premise. I need more evidence then an allegation against “one of the officials”. Unless I see more evidence I am tossing this one up to the usual bureaucratic myopia and inflexibility.

His employer's or the justice system's?

Either/or, I'm going with racism on this one. Dude is from Pakistan working in Texas and got excessively scrutinized for knowing others with Indian-sounding names. He followed protocol by doing as instructed - not wasting a single dose. He also "did not harm," which he swore to do. My guess is if he was Dr. Smith from Seattle and the people he was able to contact on short notice so as not to waste the vaccine were named Joe, Richard, John, James, Henry and so on vs Ahmed & Harjit he would have been praised for his quick thinking/action and MD decision not to waste a single dose of the vaccine.

Can I prove it? No. Do I believe it? Yes.

The catch, as has been seen in other states such as New York under Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is that local laws mandate that shots can only go to specific groups of people. During the first phase of vaccine distribution, that has typically included nursing home patients, healthcare workers, first responders, and the elderly. To administer shots outside of those groups would be in violation of the law. Compounding the matter is the Democrats' obsession with ensuring vaccines are distributed "equitably," meaning that extensive care should be given in getting the vaccine to "underserved communities" and everyone else can pound sand.