At the end of December, a doctor in Texas had a bad choice. The remaining doses in a vial of COVID-19 vaccine will spoil within a few hours, unless injected into willing patients, but dr. Hasan Gokal could not find enough of it. Instead of throwing them away, Gokal moved around in his community, digging up enough people who were willing to take the vaccines before they expired. With only a few minutes left and no one else on hand, Gokal gave the final dose to his wife.
Is Gokal a hero to ensure that these doses result in vaccinations that promote efforts to reduce the spread of the community? Or is Gokal a thief, and worse, a criminal against ‘fairness’?
The doctor in Texas had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine has been opened in late December evening, he had to qualify ten people for the remaining doses before the expensive medicine expired. In six hours.
The doctor scrambled and led people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound non-agent. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child using a ventilator.
After midnight, and minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a lung disease that leaves her short of breath.
For his performance, Dr. Gokal was fired from his job in government and charged with the theft of ten vaccine doses worth a total of $ 135 – a worthy crime that shot his name and cup around the world.
Ahasome may think, the dose for his wife is what the authorities have taken into account. However, Gokal’s wife had severe chronic lung function, and may have qualified by federal standards at the time. However, this was not the problem that caused Gokal’s employer to drop out. Instead, it was Gokal’s lack of focus on ‘equity’ that tipped the scales and led to his dismissal, at least according to Gokal’s testimony:
A few days later, the doctor said that the supervisor and the director of human resources called him together to ask if he had administered ten doses outside the scheduled event on December 29th. and was immediately fired.
The officials maintained that he had violated the protocol and should have returned or discarded the remaining doses to the office, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials frightened him by questioning the lack of ‘fairness’ among those he had vaccinated.
“Do you imagine there were too many Indian names in the group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
This was – and still is – the problem with vaccination. Officials inside and outside the government have concentrated on ‘fairness’ to such an extent that they would rather do so vaccine doses spoil than to allow them into willing arms. It’s not that stock issues do not matter at all, but a deadly pandemic should vaccination take place as widely and quickly as possible. Each dose lost is another person who can still spread the virus – and who can cause mutations that can exacerbate the pandemic.
Instead of expressing Gokal’s agility to ensure no dose is wasted, his employer canned him and Harris County prosecutors charged him with theft. A judge dismissed the charge and wrote that he “emphatically rejected” the idea of theft in the context of a doctor vaccinating people in the midst of a public health emergency. Nevertheless, prosecutors then decided to take the case to the grand jury to see if they could reinstate the theft against Gokal.
One has to wonder, however, what another judge will do with the case, even with a major jury bill after the first time Judge Franklin Bynum challenged the prosecutor. Hopefully that judge will also realize that this clown is short one car. Gokal should be reinstated and resigned, and not rushed out of his profession to ensure that the dose of COVID-19 vaccine does not go to waste. And one has to ask yourself how many doses are still left to this day because of the spectacle of this persecution of Gokal because he only did his job.