Dr. Hasan Gokal at home in Sugar Land, Tex.
A doctor in Harris county Texas physician has been charged with stealing a vial of the Moderna covid vaccine. However not is all as it seems.
Hasan Gokal was supervising a public vaccination event in the Houston suburb of Humble. The event was sparsely attended, as it was the first public vaccination event held in Harris county. Near dark, a nurse punctured a vial of vaccine to inject a final patient. Each vial contains 10-11 doses of vaccine and need to be used within 6 hours or it needs to be disposed of. After asking the first responders still at the event, Gokal called his supervisors and was told he could go ahead and use the remaining doses as he could.
Finding no takers in the vaccination facility, Gokal took the vial and went home, and administered the remaining vaccine to
- a man in his late 60s with health issues;
- the man’s bed-bound mother, in her 90s;
- his mother-in-law, in her mid-80s and with severe dementia;
- his wife, her mother’s caregiver;
- a housebound woman in her late 70s;
- a distant acquaintance in her mid-50s who works at a health clinic’s front desk;
- a 40-ish woman he had never met whose child relies on a ventilator.
Several days later, the doctor said, the supervisor he had called and the human resources director summoned him to ask whether he had administered 10 doses outside of the scheduled event on Dec. 29. He said he had, in keeping with guidelines not to waste the vaccine — and was promptly fired. The officials maintained that he 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.
That’s when Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, stepped in and charged Gokal with stealing the vial of vaccine. “He abused his position to place his friends and family in line in front of people who had gone through the lawful process to be there,” Ms. Ogg said.
Franklin Bynum, the criminal court judge assigned to this case, dismissed the charges citing lack of evidence. “In the number of words usually taken to describe an allegation of retail shoplifting, the State attempts, for the first time, to criminalize a doctor’s documented administration of vaccine doses during a public health emergency,” he wrote. “The Court emphatically rejects this attempted imposition of the criminal law on the professional decisions of a physician.”
Ogg isn’t taking the dressing down from the court lying down. She has announced plans to bring the charges to a grand jury.
The Texas Medical Association and the Harris County Medical Society recently issued a joint statement of support for physicians like Dr. Gokal who find themselves scrambling “to avoid wasting the vaccine in a punctured vial.”
“It is difficult to understand any justification for charging any well-intentioned physician in this situation with a criminal offense,” the statement said.
Doctor Gokal is paying the price for not wasting a precious resource. He’s lost his job, is facing a criminal charge from a spiteful prosecutor and doent know when his ordeal is going to end.