Dr. Gokal expressed relief in a telephone call Wednesday afternoon. “For the first time in six months I’m going to be able to go to bed tonight and not wake up in the middle thinking about this,” he said.
His lawyer, Paul Doyle, said, “What a colossal waste of time.”
In late December, Dr. Gokal, 48, a veteran emergency room doctor then working for the Harris County Public Health Department, set up a vaccination event in the Houston suburb of Humble. Just as the event was about to close for the night, an eligible person showed up. A nurse punctured a new vial to administer the vaccine, which activated the six-hour time limit for its 10 remaining doses.
Dr. Gokal later said that he was determined to abide by his understanding that not a dose of the precious vaccine should be wasted. Colleagues at the event either declined or already had been vaccinated. So, as he drove home to a neighboring county, he called acquaintances to ask whether they knew of older people needing to be immunized.
Within a few frantic hours, he had vaccinated various people in need, most of them older or in fragile health, and unknown to him. As midnight approached, he had one last dose and no one to vaccinate, so he presented the situation to his wife, whose pulmonary sarcoidosis made her eligible — but she was hesitant.
“It makes perfect sense,” he later said he told her. “We don’t want any doses wasted, period.”
The next morning, Dr. Gokal submitted the documentation for the 10 people he had vaccinated with that last vial. Several days later, he was fired from his county job; he said he was told that he should have returned the doses to the office, which by then was closed, or thrown them away.