A sacked doctor from Texas, who is now facing charges of theft of coronavirus vaccines, speaks up and defends his decision not to allow doses of the vaccine to expire.
During an interview on CBS News, Hasan Gokal, who previously worked as a doctor for the Harris County Department of Public Health and as a medical director, oversaw COVID’s distribution of vaccines, which is why he made the decision. Gokal noted that the dose of COVID vaccines would cause the stock to run out if he did not take it.
It is a province of 5 million people and we had the first 3000 thousand doses. There was no room to throw it out. Gokal said, “If you have something so precious, life-saving, it will hurt you to throw it away.”
“At that point, I started going through my phone book and thinking about who might be ‘eligible for the vaccine,'” Gokal told CBS News. He also noted that guidance from the Texas Department of Health Services suggested that they “always try to find suitable people at that level when there are remaining vaccine doses at the end of a shift.”
According to Gokal, the message from the public health agency was clear: “We do not want to waste any doses. Period,” Gokal said. At the time, Gokal managed to track down a total of nine people, all of whom were older or had some form of pre-existing condition that placed them in the high-risk category. Just before the vaccines expired, Gokal also administered one of the vaccines to his wife.
Despite Gokal’s arguments, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg maintains that he did not comply with the protocol and violated the rule of law. “He abused his position to put his friends and family in line in front of people who had gone through the legal process of being there,” Ogg said in a statement. “What he did was illegal and he is being held accountable under the law.”
Although the charges against Gokal have been dismissed and the case dismissed by a federal judge, Ogg still plans to raise the case to a grand jury.
As of Saturday, February 27, the United States has reported 29.1 million cases of coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. A total of 523,325 victims died from coronavirus complications.
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