A Texas doctor had a difficult choice one night in late December. The remaining doses in a vial of the COVID-19 vaccine would spoil within a few hours, unless injected into willing patients, but Dr. Hasan Gokal could not find enough. Instead of throwing them away, Gokal traveled through the community, digging up enough people willing to get the vaccines before they expired. With just a few minutes to finish and no one else around, Gokal gave his wife the final dose.
Is Gokal a hero for ensuring that these doses result in vaccinations, increasing efforts to reduce transmission in the community? Or is Gokal a thief and, even worse, a criminal against “equity”?
The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on the night of December, he had to find 10 people eligible for the remaining doses before the precious drug expired. In six hours.
Struggling, the doctor made home calls and directed people to his home outside Houston. Some were known; others, strangers. A bedridden nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. Mother with son using fan.
After midnight, and just a few minutes before the vaccine became unusable, doctor Hasan Gokal gave his wife the last dose, who has a lung disease that makes her short of breath.
For his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and later accused of stealing 10 doses of vaccine worth a total of $ 135 – a misdemeanor that deserved to be avoided and that made his name and photo shoot all over the place. world.
Aha, some may think, the dose for his wife is what triggered the authorities. However, Gokal’s wife has serious chronic lung dysfunction and may well have qualified by federal standards to receive the injection at that time. That was not the problem that triggered Gokal’s employer, however. Instead, it was Gokal’s lack of focus on “equity” that made the balance unbalanced and led to his resignation, at least according to Gokal’s testimony:
Several days later, the doctor said, that supervisor and director of human resources asked him to ask if he had administered 10 doses outside the event scheduled for December 29. He said yes, according to the guidelines of not wasting the vaccine – and was immediately fired.
Authorities said he had violated the protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown it away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the employees surprised him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those vaccinated.
“Are you suggesting that there were many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was informed.
That was – and still is – exactly the problem with vaccine launches. Officials inside and outside the government have focused on issues of “equity” to the point that they prefer spoil vaccine doses than leaving them in willing arms. It is not that equity issues do not matter, but a deadly pandemic needs vaccination to take place as widely and quickly as possible. Each missed dose is another person who can still spread the virus – and who can produce mutations that can make the pandemic worse.
Instead of saluting Gokal’s agility to ensure that no doses were missed, his employer fired him and Harris County prosecutors accused him of theft. A judge rejected the charge, writing that he “emphatically rejects” the notion of theft in the context of a doctor who vaccinates people in the midst of a public health emergency. However, prosecutors decided to take the case to the grand jury to see if they could reinstate the charge of theft against Gokal.
One wonders, however, what another judge will do with the case, even with a grand jury bill, after Judge Franklin Bynum rebuked prosecutors the first time. Hopefully, this judge will also notice that this clown show has a short car. Gokal needs to be reinstated and thanked, not expelled from his profession for ensuring that doses of the COVID-19 vaccine would not go to waste. And we must ask ourselves how many more doses are being left to spoil today because of the spectacle of this persecution of Gokal just for doing his job.