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A licensed Texan doctor who now faces charges of coronavirus vaccine theft 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 was previously a physician for the Harris County Public Health Department and was the medical director overseeing the distribution of the COVID vaccine in the county, explained why he made the decision . Gokal noted that COVID vaccine doses would have subsequently led to wasted supplies if he had not taken them.
This is a county of 5 million people and we received the first 3,000,000 doses. There was no place to throw everything away. Never, “Gokal said.” When you have something so precious, to save lives, it would hurt you to throw it away. “
“At that point, I start going through my phone list, thinking about who might ‘qualify for the vaccine,’ Gokal told CBS News. He also noted that the advice provided by the Texas State Department suggested that they “always try to find eligible people at that level when there are vaccine doses left at the end of a shift.”
According to Gokal, the message from the public health agency was quite clear: “We don’t want wasted doses. Full stop,” Gokal said. At the time, Gokal managed to locate a total of nine people, all of whom were older or had some form 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 protocol and violated the rule of law. “He abused his position to put his friends and family online in front of people who had gone through the legal process to be there,” Ogg said in a statement. “What he did was illegal and he will be held accountable under the law.”
Although the charges against Gokal have been dropped and the case dismissed 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 from the coronavirus.
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