Kim Ogg Still Hasn’t Apologized For Charging Doctor Who Vaccinated Too Many Patients With “Indian” Sounding Names
Toplines:
Kim Ogg boasted about charging Dr. Hasan Gokal with vaccine theft for administering expiring doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that would have otherwise gone to waste.
The charges were based on Harris County Public Health’s decision to fire Dr. Gokal, claiming that he gave the vaccine to too many patients with “Indian sounding names.”
Ogg claimed that Dr. Gokal, “abused his position” and “disregarded county protocols” when he administered the remaining doses from a vial that was opened at 6:45 pm and would have expired in six hours.
Despite making false claims that caused Dr. Gokal immense reputational damage, Ogg has yet to issue an apology, despite the public outcry from South Asian and medical communities.
Full Report:
“Just put it in people’s arms. We don’t want any doses to go to waste. Period.” That was the urgent message from Texas state health officials—echoing advice from public health officials around the country— during the frantic December 2020 rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. Once the seal on a vial was punctured, doctors had only six hours to locate and inject patients before any remaining doses would expire, wasting our most potent weapon against a catastrophic pandemic.
At 6:45 pm on December 29, 2020, a Houston nurse opened a vial of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine to vaccinate the day’s last patient. Keeping with his moral and professional obligations, Dr. Hasan Gokal, Medical Director for Harris County Public Health’s Covid-response team, made extraordinary efforts to ensure that the doses went to eligible patients. At the time, eligible people included those over age 65 with certain medical conditions. And so as time passed and expiration neared, Dr. Gokal reached out to acquaintances who qualified and who could be reached in time. In the end, he successfully located and vaccinated an eligible patient for each remaining dose.
Dr. Gokal should have been praised as a hero. Instead, he was fired and criminally prosecuted.
In a move that is now the subject of a racial discrimination lawsuit, Harris County Public Health terminated Dr. Gokal’s position with the county. HCPH management told Dr. Gokal, an immigrant from Pakistan, that he hadn’t administered the vaccines “equitably” and gave too many doses to people with “Indian” sounding names. This is according to Dr. Gokal’s complaint, and not refuted in Harris County’s Answer Brief. “Had he administered these to people with American-sounding names, we wouldn’t be here,” said Paul Doyle, attorney for Dr. Gokal.
District Attorney Kim Ogg quickly joined the attack on Dr. Gokal. She sought criminal charges for misdemeanor theft and claimed that 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.”
This is hardly the first time that an overzealous prosecutor prioritized their thirst for publicity and convictions over public health and safety, but it is an especially frivolous example.
For one: there was no “line” or “lawful process” for Dr. Gokal to violate, even if he wanted to. In his civil complaint, Dr. Gokal’s explains that, “[b]ecause the approval of the vaccine for emergency use came faster than expected, HCPH had not set up its protocols or a waiting list for the vaccine.” An email from the prosecutor handling the case, Assistant District Attorney Kimberly Smith, confirms this: “[T]here weren’t any written protocols at that time,” she wrote, and they “were not provided with a written waitlist.”
Thus, even setting aside the threat that her actions posed to public health, Ogg’s office filed criminal charges and issued an inflammatory press release without even conducting a basic investigation. Ogg was either uninformed or lying when she claimed that Dr. Gokal “disregarded county protocols,” because those protocols didn’t exist.
Nevertheless, Ogg persisted, and met swift pushback in court. The trial judge found that Ogg’s office did not establish probable cause in an affidavit that he called “riddled with sloppiness and errors.” “The Court emphatically rejects this attempted imposition of the criminal law on the professional decisions of a physician,” Bynum wrote. Still undeterred, Ogg’s office then took the unusual step of submitting the case to a grand jury, who similarly declined to find probable cause.
While the trial judge and the grand jury showed the legal flaws in Ogg’s case, medical experts condemned Ogg as a threat to doctors and patients.
“This is not a prosecution, this is a persecution, it is an outright abuse of state power,” said Dr. Zahid Imran, Houston resident and physician of Pakistani origin, who described the approach as “shoot and then ask questions later.” “There is an emotional cost when a physician cannot do what their conscience is telling them. This is what causes burnout. It is incredibly frustrating to fight battles with bureaucracy for the sake of the patients.”
"It is difficult to understand any justification for charging any well-intentioned physician in this situation with a criminal offense," said The Texas Medical Association in a public statement, criticizing Ogg’s filing decision. “Physicians and health care workers are scrambling to get the vaccine into as many arms as possible, as quickly as possible, to stop the spread of this potentially fatal virus. They follow priority-order protocols as closely as they can and then apply common sense if it’s necessary to prevent waste of this precious vaccine. They should be applauded, not penalized, for doing so.”
Ogg not only penalized Dr. Gokal for his efforts to save lives, she damaged his reputation and caused him severe distress. “It was my world coming down,” Dr. Gokal told the New York Times. “To have everything collapse on you. God, it was the lowest moment in my life.”
In an op-ed last year, Dr. Sana Syed, a medical doctor and research scientist, demanded an apology from Ogg to Dr. Gokal. Her demand was joined by numerous organizations that “condemn the continued persecution of Gokal by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.”
Groups including American Muslim Health Professionals, American Medical Student Association, Doctors For America, Imamia Medics International and Physicians for Human Rights also signed a solidarity letter to support Dr. Gokal, stating, “[o]ur health and human rights organizations stand with the Texas Medical Association and the Harris County Medical Society in applauding, not penalizing physicians like Gokal, who are working hard to avoid wasting vaccines.”
“This case was so clearly unjust from the beginning, it’s shocking that there is still a failure to take responsibility, which reflects a lack of leadership by the District Attorney Kim Ogg,” Paul Doyle, Dr. Gokal’s lawyer told Houston Watch.
After all this, an apology seemed like the least that Ogg could do, and we assumed she’d want to make things right. So Houston Watch reached out to District Attorney Ogg to ask whether she would apologize to Dr. Gokal for making inaccurate statements about his actions and charging him with a crime that never happened. Ogg ignored our request.