A dismissed Texas doctor who now faces charges of theft of coronavirus vaccines is speaking out and defending 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 served as medical director overseeing the distribution of the county’s COVID vaccine, explained why he made the decision. Gokal noted that doses of the COVID vaccine would subsequently have caused the supply to go to waste if he had not taken them.
This is a county of 5 million inhabitants and we had the first 3,000 doses. There was no space to throw anything away. Never, “said Gokal.” When you have something so precious, life-saving, it would be painful to throw it away. “
“At this point, I start to go through my phone book, thinking about who can” qualify for the vaccine, Gokal told CBS News. He also noted that the guidance provided by the Texas State Department of Health Services suggested that they “always try to find qualified people at that level when there are surplus doses of vaccine at the end of a shift.”
According to Gokal, the message from the public health agency was very clear: “We don’t want any missed doses. Period,” said Gokal. At the time, Gokal managed to locate a total of nine people, all of whom were older or had some kind 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 insists he did not follow the protocol and violated the rule of law. “He abused his position to put his friends and family in front of people who had gone through the legal process to be there,” said Ogg in a statement. “What he did was illegal and he will be held accountable to the law.”
Although the charges against Gokal have been dropped and the case closed by a federal judge, Ogg still plans to take the case to a grand jury.
On Saturday, February 27, the United States reported 29.1 million cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. A total of 523,325 victims died from complications of the coronavirus.
Related articles on the web