Doctor cleared of COVID-19 vaccine theft sues Harris County | New policies

By TERRY WALLACE, Associated Press

A doctor who was fired after Houston-area public health officials accused him of stealing vials of COVID-19 vaccine to administer to family and friends sued the county on Tuesday, accusing him of discriminating against South Asians and of spreading disinformation about him.

The lawsuit on behalf of Dr. Hasan Gokal seeks unspecified damages.

Gokal said his supervisor in the Harris County Public Health Department and a representative from the department’s human resources office accused him of administering the vaccine to too many people of southern origin or origin. -Asian late the first night of the Moderna vaccine rollout in a northern Harris county. parking lot last December. Everyone present had been vaccinated and 10 doses remained.

None of the volunteers and police present during the deployment wanted them, Gokal said, so he called people he knew, and even his wife, who were eligible to receive the doses late at night. “So that night I went around to make sure all of those 10 doses were being administered,” he said.

“There was not a single person who was refused (for the vaccination) to whom he could have given it instead,” said Michael Killingsworth, Gokal’s lawyer.

Gokal said he regularly reported and documented what he did. He said he was told, “Oh, you admit it? So you’re fired.

“This was said in no uncertain terms,” Gokal said in a video interview Tuesday from his Houston attorney’s office. “The conversation was specifically, when I was told I had done the wrong things, ‘Well, you didn’t distribute it fairly.’ I asked him, “Fairly? What do you mean fairly? Are you saying there are too many Indian names in the bunch?” He looks at me and says, ‘Exactly.’ “

The department charged him with misdemeanor theft, which a judge dismissed, and reported it to the state’s medical licensing board. County officials still took the theft case to the grand jury, a process that took six months before the jury finally exonerated him.

The medical licensing board had cleared him long before that date and he was able to resume practicing emergency medicine at hospitals in the Houston area.

A spokesperson for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office referred the requests for a response to the county attorney’s office, which did not immediately return a message.

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