Houston doctor fired for scramble to use expired vaccines won’t be charged

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Dr. Gokal expressed his satisfaction in a phone call on Wednesday afternoon. “For the first time in six months I will be able to go to bed tonight and not wake up in the middle thinking about it,” he said.

“What a colossal waste of time,” said his attorney, Paul Doyle.

In late December, Dr. Jokal, 48, an emergency room veteran with the Harris County Department of Public Health, held a vaccination event in the Houston suburb of Humble. Just as the event was about to end at night, a qualified person appeared. A nurse hacked into a new vial to administer the vaccine, triggering the six-hour timeout for the remaining ten doses.

Dr. Gokal later said he was determined to stick to his understanding that no dose of the precious vaccine should be wasted. Colleagues in the event either refused or were already vaccinated. So, when he was driving home in a neighboring county, he called his acquaintances to ask if they knew the elderly needed to be vaccinated.

In a few frantic hours, he vaccinated many people in need, most of them elderly or in fragile health, unknown to him. As midnight approached, he had one last dose and no one got vaccinated, so he offered the situation to his wife, for whom pulmonary sarcoidosis made her eligible—but she was reluctant.

He later told her, “It makes perfect sense.” “We don’t want to waste any potions, period.”

The next morning, Dr. Gokal presented the documents to ten people whom he had vaccinated with the last vial. Several days later, he was fired from his county job; He said he was told he should have taken the potions back to the office, which by that time was closed, or throw them away.

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