Houston doctor fired for ‘stealing’ COVID-19 vaccines speaks up

A Texas doctor was fired from his job and then charged with stealing 10 COVID-19 vaccine doses in late December, worth a total of $135, after he gave his wife a jab to use before it expired. He has finally put forward his side of the story. 

Dr Hasan Gokal had just six hours to find 10 eligible people for the remaining doses of precious vaccines after someone had opened the vial of the jabs earlier.

The doctor scrambled to find people outside his home in 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.

With just minutes away from the vaccine becoming unusable, doctor Gokal gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.

In an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Dr Gokal said after that night “It was my world coming down.”

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“To have everything collapse on you. God, it was the lowest moment in my life.” 

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

Unfolds in front of the eyes of the US citizens is a very nascent case of bioethics in the country as the world still tries to comprehend the unprecedented situation.

“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 to NYT. “They were thinking, ‘This guy is a villain.'”

Gokal, 48, immigrated from Pakistan as a boy and earned a medical degree at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.

In 2009, he moved to Texas 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.

On Tuesday, December 29, Dr Gokal had arrived at a park in a Houston suburb to supervise a vaccination event, mostly for emergency workers. 

At around 6:45 in the evening, 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.

With six hours in his hands, Gokal drove all across the country to find 10 eligible recipients so that the vaccines won’t go to waste.

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However, with 15 minutes to spare and still a dose left, Dr Gokal gave his wife the very last Moderna jab.

Several days later, when asked if he had given the 10 vaccines outside schedule, he said he had done it in keeping with guidelines not to waste the vaccine — and was promptly fired.

The officials reasoned that Gokal 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, NYT reported.