Pakistan-born doctor charged with stealing vaccine in Houston, TX. Fired from job. Administered vaccine to wife.

[BacktoCricaddict]

What a scumbag, no?  Read on.

 

https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/ct-aud-nw-nyt-doctor-fired-for-using-vaccine-20210211-x6yzgl2ei5dq3akzu57xe76wde-story.html

 

Quote

Excerpt:  On Dec. 29, a mild Tuesday, Gokal arrived before dawn at a park in the Houston suburb of Humble to supervise a vaccination event intended mostly for emergency workers. In part because of minimal publicity, the pace was slow, with no more than 250 doses administered. But this was the county’s first public event, he said. “We knew there would be hiccups.”

Around 6:45 at night, 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.

The chances of 10 eligible people suddenly showing up were slim; by now, workers were offsetting the darkness with car headlights. But Gokal said he was determined not to waste a single dose.

He said he first asked the event’s 20 or so workers, who either refused or had already been vaccinated. The paramedics on site had left, and of the two police officers, one had been vaccinated and the other declined the doctor’s offer.

Gokal said he called a Harris County public health official in charge of operations to report his plans to find 10 people to receive the remaining doses. He said he was told, simply: OK.

He said he then called another high-ranking colleague whose parents and in-laws were eligible for the vaccine. They weren’t available.

The hours were counting down.

The doctor figured that if he returned the open vial to his department’s almost certainly empty office at this late hour, it would go to waste. So as he started the drive to his home in a neighboring county, he said, he called people in his cellphone’s contact list to ask whether they had older relatives or neighbors needing to be immunized.

“No one I was really intimately familiar with,” Gokal said. “I wasn’t that close to anyone.”

When he reached his home in Sugar Land, waiting outside were a woman in her mid-60s with cardiac issues, and a woman in her early 70s with assorted health problems. He inoculated both.

Eight doses to go.

The doctor got back in his car — his wife insisted on going with him — and drove to a Sugar Land house with four eligible people: 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; and his wife, her mother’s caregiver.

He then drove to the home of a housebound woman in her late 70s and administered the vaccine. “I didn’t know her at all,” he said.

Three doses remained, but three people had agreed to meet the doctor at his home. Two were already waiting: a distant acquaintance in her mid-50s who works at a health clinic’s front desk, and a 40-ish woman he had never met whose child relies on a ventilator.

As midnight approached, Gokal said, the third would-be recipient called to say that he wouldn’t be coming: too late.

Tired and frustrated, Gokal said that he turned to his wife, whose pulmonary sarcoidosis made her eligible for the vaccine. “I didn’t intend to give this to you, but in a half-hour I’m going to have to dump this down the toilet,” he recalled telling her. “It’s as simple as that.”

He said his hesitant wife asked whether it was the right thing to do. “It makes perfect sense,” he said he answered. “We don’t want any doses wasted, period.”

With 15 minutes to spare, Gokal gave his wife the last Moderna dose.

The next morning, he said, he submitted the paperwork for the 10 people he had vaccinated the previous night, including his wife. He said he also informed his supervisor and colleagues of what he had done, and why.

Several days later, the doctor said, that supervisor and the human resources director summoned him to ask whether he had administered 10 doses outside 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.

“Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Gokal said he asked.

Exactly, he said he was told.

Elizabeth Perez, the director of communications for Harris County Public Health, said the department was unable to comment on its protocols, the Dec. 29 vaccination event or the Gokal case.

On Jan. 21, about two weeks after the doctor’s termination, a friend called to say that a local reporter had just tweeted about him. At that very moment, one of his three children answered the door to bright lights and a thrust microphone. Shaken, the 16-year-old boy closed the door and said, “Dad, there are people out there with cameras.”

This was how Gokal learned that he had been charged with stealing vaccine doses.

Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, had just issued a news release that afternoon with the headline: “Fired Harris County Health Doctor Charged With Stealing Vial Of Covid-19 Vaccine.”

It alleged that Gokal “stole the vial” and disregarded county protocols to ensure that vaccines are not wasted and are administered to eligible people on a waiting list. “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,” Ogg said.

But Gokal said that no one from the district attorney’s office had ever contacted him to hear his version of events. And when his lawyer requested copies of the written protocols and waiting list referred to in the complaint, a prosecutor told him by email that there were no written protocols from late December; nor had a written waitlist yet been found.

Harris County had received the vaccine faster than anticipated, the email said, and public health officials “immediately jumped from testing to vaccinating.”

As news of his alleged crime spread, Gokal heard from relatives and friends in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and his home country, Pakistan. “Many were calling me for support, telling me, ‘We know you better than that,’” he said. “But there were a lot of people who didn’t call.”

Days later, a criminal court judge, Franklin Bynum, dismissed the case for lack of probable cause.

“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.”

Both the Texas Medical Association and the Harris County Medical Society recently issued a statement of support for physicians like 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.

 

The guy is a hero, if you ask me.  

 

Edited February 11, 2021 by BacktoCricaddict

[Texy]

Hope he sues them and get his job back + $$

[sandeep]

The fact that he escaped criminal prosecution only because he was lucky enough to have his criminal case assigned to a Judge who was honest is luck.  

 

That District Attorney is a racist.  At worst the guy is guilty of preferring to call friends and people he knew instead of a more "randomized" distribution, but under the circumstances, it is reasonable.  

 

He did not deserve to lose his job, and definitely not deserve to be persecuted like this.  He can sue and win a lot of money, and I hope he does.

[kepler37b]

I have a different opinion.

 

The way the western folks think is different from us. They value highly organized rules-oriented systems. Going up in chaotic societies, we are NOT systematic . For us he has done no wrong. But from western POV he has broken the rules and deserves what comes next.

 

He is right and wrong at the same time.

[BacktoCricaddict]

1 hour ago, kepler37b said:

I have a different opinion.

 

The way the western folks think is different from us. They value highly organized rules-oriented systems. Going up in chaotic societies, we are NOT systematic . For us he has done no wrong. But from western POV he has broken the rules and deserves what comes next.

 

He is right and wrong at the same time.

Calling BS on "Western" ethics.  The doctor's training guidelines clearly state that it is a priority to not waste vaccine.  

 

Clear case of implicit bias.  This is especially clear with the admission that they charged him because he made phone calls to mostly Indians.  Context?  His patient base is probably enriched in people of Indian/Pakistani heritage because he can speak Hindi/Punjabi and they are comfortable with that.  But as soon as the county made the assumption that he called "his buddies," with no further investigation, they lost the plot.  Frikkin a-holes.  They should've just had a conversation with him saying "just call us first next time, doc."

Edited February 14, 2021 by BacktoCricaddict

[kepler37b]

The vaccine was clearly NOT his property. If it is NOT, he has to comply by the rules of the owner. Or that of institution. Not by individual whims and emotions, as it happens in South Asian institutions.

 

But the punishment is out of proportion.

[BacktoCricaddict]

On 2/14/2021 at 1:08 PM, kepler37b said:

The vaccine was clearly NOT his property. If it is NOT, he has to comply by the rules of the owner. Or that of institution. Not by individual whims and emotions, as it happens in South Asian institutions.

 

But the punishment is out of proportion.

The owner is the County.  I inferred from the article that the training they gave him had a guideline that said not to waste vaccine.  The issue really seemed to be "equity."  Which in this situation is a silly premise.    

Edited February 16, 2021 by BacktoCricaddict

[Sandeep99]

Why am I not surprised? These things come naturally to padosis. Such talentless scumbags...