The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
nyti.ms
nyti.ms
Get a homeless person an apartment? Great.
But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making money and took most of your earnings away to pay for the housing. The program constantly threatened to take away your funding if the paperwork wasn't perfect. The program constantly made mistakes, paid rent late, and generally threatened a vulnerable homeless person with further homelessness.
It was infuriating to experience this through another person. In attempts to help a person, these programs were taking vulnerable people, dangling housing in front of them, and constantly threatening them with taking it away. That is of course exactly the opposite of what you need to do to someone having trouble taking care of themselves, and sadly mirrors the abusive kinds of situation which so often leads people to homelessness.
There are two issues with this:
- "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population needs government assistance
- "welfare queens" is largely a fiction -- the story comes from Linda Taylor[0], a woman who cheated the welfare system, but was caught, tried, and served prison time for her fraud. In other words, the system worked, but anyone relying on government assistance should be punished for it.
The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services).
In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.
Of course it seems hard to separate "the hiring manager wants to work with them [because they are a great vendor]" from "the hiring manager wants to work with them because they pay for the hiring manager's kids' school and family vacation" without adequate documentation.
Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing and simply using handouts to survive? If they worked, shouldn't they become more prosperous? Why don't they have goals and aspirations? If someone is depressed, let's get them help. If the education system has failed them, let's fix that. It's easy to conflate the symptoms with the root causes, however the symptoms should not be ignored because they are the most visible feedback to most regular people, and that affects their perception of the system.
Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something, and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating.
Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.)
Yes, some unemployed people might turn to drink, drugs, or petty crime, but this can be solved by building community infrastructure. The ills of the Parisian banlieues, for example, are often ascribed not just to unemployment, but to the fact that all the cultural and leisure facilities that were promised back in the 1970s were never actually built.
I would like to learn more about the issue. Do you have any references handy?
Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. But going to a grueling 9-5 to make less money for long term benefits is still a tough sell
It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.
Usually this is "solved" via "aligning incentives". [1] But as we all know from James Cameron's documentaries as he followed the Connors, it's not that easy to notice when things go awry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... [1] https://intelligence.org/research/
This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because the state allows it.
But so what?
The goal of a program should be effectively improving the functioning of society. That can still be a real outcome even if there are people who choose to be less productive so they can obtain benefits.
The concept might be foreign to most HNers, but lots of people lack entrepreneurial spirit, they instead attempt to minimize pain in their lives.
As long as it's sustainable, why worry? Do we want to drag people into productivity or just let them live their own lives?
I think it's inefficient to do the former.
I think this is the perfect outcome for the type of person who wants to live their life that way because the alternative, working somewhere, means they will be the worst coworker or employee you have ever had. They'll do just enough to not be fired and never enough to actually be worth their paycheck, walking the line and wasting resources that could be spent elsewhere. I've worked with this person and they destroy team morale and productivity without even trying, they're not bad people and I harbor no ill-will towards them, they just don't want to be there and have very few other options in our society.
While I think we must take care not to create too much of incentive for this lifestyle, I will happily pay money out of my paycheck to not have to work with those that prefer it.
Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare?
These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse.
If you want more people to work, push for higher wages. If you want people to be capable of working for less money, ensure that childcare, public transportation, and healthcare are subsidized enough to make those wages livable.
Indeed. I also suspect "wrong people" is a slightly quieter dog whistle/code word for you know, "those people".
I also wonder how the welfare cheater statictic compares to the disability cheater statistic. I'd even wager disability is far more abused than welfare by ablebodied workers who make good money and have homes.
Now imagine if we used the same "wrong person" argument against disability and watch the same people who would vote against welfare vote in favor of disability because they might be affected.
prioritization in vaccination at the cost of incredible inneficiency is celebrated by the media and our political class. I'm not so upset about the cost as much as the delays it causes to herd immunity. which is presumably what this vaccination program is all about.
My sister in law applied for need-based financial aid at a flagship state school. It was so complicated that my wife and I (both corporate attorneys) had to jump on a Zoom call with her and the financial aid office to help sort things out. I can't imagine having to go through all those hoops for housing, etc.
This is a critically pressing problem with Medicaid. The majority of uninsured people in the country are eligible for free insurance under Medicaid, an ACA Bronze plan, or at least subsidies under the ACA: https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/millions-of-uninsured-ameri.... Everyone who files a tax return showing income under the threshold should be automatically registered in Medicaid.
Fraud does happen. But it doesn't happen enough for it to be worth setting up an entire bureaucracy to prevent it. Especially if that bureaucracy undermines the value of the program for everyone who's faithfully making use of the services in the intended manner.
More and more, it seems that keeping social welfare programs inefficient is benefiting the people who want to remove them entirely (in favor of lowering taxes).
But perhaps it would happen vastly more if that bureaucracy wasn't trying to prevent? I don't know, but I suspect there are an awful lot of people who would commit fraud if they thought they'd get away with it.
Accept that some people getting help will need it less than others.
There's "fraud" and then there's homeless people trying to get their lives on track. People who need help and support. Saddling them with complex frequent requirements and then calling failing to meet them "fraud" is not helping people.
Be interested in helping people instead of helping only the "right" people.
It's simpler just to give every citizen the same amount of money than to have to deal with all the edge cases of people having different income this year (and needing the money immediately) versus last year. If you get hit by a bus on January 1st, I'd hope that the money was available for you right away, not in another year.
Additionally, I'd like to see a "rolling average" approach to taxation. I think it's enormously unfair that someone who has a one time event (like making a million dollar commission on a sale they worked on for five years) is taxed massively more, and misses out on many more tax credits, than someone who makes $200K a year for five years.
However, from a society-level view, how much value do we get from the X spent in prevention? We're funneling money to a specific goal, so some verification is needed. But the more we verify, the more man-hours we spend on filling out and checking the paperwork. None of that work benefits society. Those people could've been doing other jobs that perform useful services. And it's not like the money going to fraudsters vanishes. At least it goes back into the economy. We should require only enough to make sure we achieve the program's goals within budget.
Figuring that out is the hard part. Hopefully smart minds have been tackling this.
Actually no, at least 40 billion went to a Nigerian scammer group. That’s a national security issue and overrides concerns about charity and equity. It’s an existential threat.
(I mean entirely, because if there are people living comfortably on the program without no motivation to do anything else in their life, then a) maybe that's okay, b) maybe that's a mental health issue [and fixing it might cost a lot more], c) at some point the fraud becomes so encompassing, that it's not the program's fault, but it's someone literally robbing taxpayers via whatever means they can. Furthermore any social program that only addresses and takes into account some narrow slice of people's life problems will be easily gameable, so let's have comprehensive integrated programs. Yes, they are hard, but it's not like putting people on the moon is that much easier.)
And also make markets freer. The amount of rent-seeking behavior around programs like WIC is just staggering. And it serves the interests of neither WIC recipients nor the general public; it's only there because pearl-clutching is easy to co-opt for financial gain.
who cares, on the face of it, what size the government is? size is not the goal, it's at best a poor proxy metric for (in-)efficiency, which itself is a proxy metric for how much we help people via public goods (and thereby the whole economy).
rent-seeking around wic is a rounding error next to property & capital rent-seeking overall. moreover, the right place to place blame (and seek redress) is with the rent-seekers themselves, not the assistance recipients (or the associated governmental programs) being exploited by them.
Perhaps framing things in classical liberal terms feels like de-centering assistance recipients. I get that, but I'm not sure that's actually a bad thing, in this case. I can't imagine your average WIC participant actually wants to live under a microscope, regardless of the political leanings of the person who's looking through it.
It's an example of how pearl-clutching attitudes - in this case, fears, based on deeply entrenched moralistic notions about less-wealthy people's ability to make decisions for themselves, that people might buy the wrong food - are easy to co-opt for mercenary purposes, to basically nobody's benefit.
Until the size stops correlating with the amount of resources that must be taken from people everybody with anything to their name cares.
The goal posts aren't there. If a certain number of students fail it creates red flags for the district and if those students are a certain minority that can viewed as evidence of institutional racism and open up legal liabilities as such the districts are highly motivated to pass everyone along but to not to make the good and willing better.
Meanwhile, the kids at the bottom get left behind.
I turned out relatively fine but I would rank my time in the "gifted" program as an active harm to that from what I remember.
They will be better educated, have more economic opportunities, more financial support from society, and be more well connected.
Meritocratic programs exacerbate inequality and grow the divide between the kids at the top and those at the bottom.
Maybe we shouldn't stop doing them, but we need to think about supporting the bottom, such as free lunch, without exception.
Free lunch doesn't do that. full bellies learn better, but if mom/dad have a "who cares" attitude, that is very likely to flow down to kids.
I also acknowledge the challenge of getting people to care. Its no easy feat.
https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-are-tests-biased-agains...
(Separating children into deserving and undeserving categories of educational attention seems that way to me...)
In today's school system, the resources go to those who do not desire an education. This is because of programs like "no child left behind", and because a higher graduation rate looks better. But I think we should make a normative judgement that those who do not make an effort to better themselves should receive no support from society. Put less money into summer schools for kids who fail, and put more money into before- and after-school tutoring. This will benefit those who put in the effort to the detriment of those who don't care, which is a good trade-off.
Why can't we have summer schools and before/after-school tutoring?
that can be said enough!
In theory I sympathize with the sentiment, but 1) the dole is not wealth 2) the administration costs of the dole don't make money disappear, its just routed into income for the admin workers, 3) the administration costs of the dole do not necessarily decrease with UBI and might increase given a larger population to administer.
I generally do not support UBI since the key problem isn't cash in people's pockets, it is lack of engagement with society in ways that add value. UBI papers over the core problem.
There are two sets of rules in this world.
https://abc7news.com/california-edd-unemployment-fraud-ca-sc...
$30 billion in unemployment fraud in just a year, in just one state.
It's identity fraud. (Entirely because of the tragic state of US [and global] privacy and state-citizen communication culture.)
It's not people taking advantage of welfare and deciding to not look for work. It's career criminals.
If the system is fine except in situations like a once a century global pandemic that throws way more people out of work than normally happens even in most recessions and throws them out of work for longer than is normal where it jumps to a fraud rate of 30% or so (and presumably returns to normal when the pandemic is over), I'm OK with that.
If the "undeserving" argument were true, there wouldn't be talk about increasing eligibility to the prison population, especially given their low mortality rates compared to 65+
Once people start viewing the system as inherently unfair, then it can start to fall apart pretty quickly.
Not saying that the vaccine situation in the article is an example of an unfair situation.
> Last week a local vaccine site had extra doses nearing the end of the day and word spread. Ultimately, they put them in the arms of whoever could get there in time.
> I personally know two unrelated people who raced there and got vaccinated, despite not meeting the criteria mentioned in the article. The only criteria that mattered in this instance were being present and being willing.
> This was also in Houston and at an “official” site. I attempted to get similarly lucky at the same site the next day by visiting at closing time. The worker that turned me away told me that because of complaints from those who missed out the day before, they were told to no longer accept walk-ins. I’m content to wait my turn, but that experience combined with this persecution story...I have to wonder how many doses are going to waste in my community.
solving 1 does not automatically solve 2. the slider between anarchocapitalism and state-owned and -operated socialism belongs somewhere in the middle and everyone wants to tug it into a different spot.
if theres anything the internet + social media is teaching us, its that the public has a very, very bad habit of watching one 15 second video of anecdata and vigorously extrapolating, thinking they have arrived at actual data.
all it would take is a couple tweets about some homeless asshole partying in his free government house with his foodstamp money to upset 2 and overthrow 1, even if it was the best solution on the spreadsheet.
Had the judge not thrown out this case, she'd have another feather in her cap, another headline for the website: "Kim Ogg puts nepotistic, racist, embezzling doctor behind bars!" Doesn't need to be honest, just needs to sound good.
The official statements of the medical associations in the article state: “It is difficult to understand any justification for charging any well-intentioned physician in this situation with a criminal offense.” As there is clearly no legal justification, the only justification in sight is progressive identity politics attacking a "white-adjacent" physician.
Basically, the more categories of historically marginalized people groups an individual belongs to, the more acceptable that person is, the more of a voice they’re allowed to have, and the more laudable it is to favor that person (and the more unacceptable it is to fail to favor that person regardless of the circumstances).
This doctor apparently “failed” to favor the right people. The progressive calculus around the case is all about “who”, and it intentionally excludes what, when, where, why, or how.
It’s actually a strategy for leaders to want the underlings to stick their neck out, so that they can be sacrificed as a scapegoat when convenient.
(in these bureaurocratic situations, obviously I’m not talking about a leader asking people to murder others and them not being responsible for that).
In this specific case; where's the prosecutorial discretion? If it's coming down from on high, why aren't their names in this article?
I don't know that that's a useful question in this context. Bureaucracies function in intensely amoral ways. Even ones with a moral mission. You can embarrass the leadership with moral judgments, and that will steer things for at least as long as public scrutiny maintains its attention span. Internally, though, the rules look more like game theory, and the bureaucracy will naturally tend to reject anyone who doesn't want to play the game.
> what's difference that makes 'just following orders' suddenly not apply?
I don’t know, but this situation isn’t it in my opinion. It can be fixed with a flick of a pen (or email) by a higher up.
Most of them aren't blind. They know full well they're missing the forest for the trees but they follow through anyway in order to cover their butts and they justify it with "policy is policy" and "I've only got three years until my pension kicks up to the X% bracket".
I think the issue here is that the organization was stupid and unable to use them. And while the doctor’s motives seem virtuous, his wife got a vaccine ahead of schedule.
I think we have to improve efficiency, but not also set up a system where friends and family of doctors get preferential treatment because of proximity.
This whole issue is solved by better inventory management where about to expire doses are used first, not poorly managed so that a healthcare worker has to try to handle logistics directly.
I think the whole case would have been different if he didn’t personally benefit through his decisions by giving a dose to his wife.
If he wanted to cover-his-ass, he shouldn't have given it to her. If he wanted to actually do the right thing, he was doing the right thing.
I think it’s hard to know how much someone tried or didn’t try superficially based on a Times article and the doctor’s story.
The system is so messed up that the director of covid vaccinations can’t even find 9 people to vaccinate in six hours.
It’s very convenient that there was only one dose left for his sick wife. The wife was right to question whether it was right, but more importantly was that they should have considered the perception of the situation.
If something will have the look of corruption, but will result in waste, go for the waste, every time.
It would be easy to imagine a cooked up scheme whereby two vials were opened, instead of using an entire one resulting in a surplus of 10 doses with 6 hours expiry overnight which would mean “I had to give them to my family”.
So imagine if this is left to slide, there is the potential for huge numbers of vaccines to be given to family and friends. The desirability of the vaccine and the deadliness of the virus could also encourage bribes to propagate such schemes.
The whole thing has a very bad look and to trust the people in charge of the program would require a full investigation in order to clear the situation of corruption. Of the officials don’t act, they are at risk of being complicit.
The potential reputations damage from his action is much greater than he realized.
Copy paste this to other scenarios and I think you will find the excuse of “otherwise it would go to waste” a massive vector for all sorts of corruption at every level. How hard does someone try to find someone in need of something will go to waste? How will we ever know? It’s the slippery slope of corruption that poison societies.
Corruption is the deadliest thing in human existence.
Anyone who thinks that this would not happen doesn't know human nature very well. They are welcome to post situations where such excuses haven't been taken advantage of. I'll take lack of replies as acceptance of my point.
In my opinion that makes this, at least in part, a fault of those above him. There should be a standby list with a clear expectancy of urgency. If you get a call at 2am, you either show up or get passed by. Fill it with all the front-line workers in the county or something like that first, then start pulling in the public.
There should be _no_ shortage of people willing to take this, we're just spending so much time worrying about who gets it and not enough time worrying about ensuring that every last dose is effectively used and not wasted.
Edit: Also, I only replied so you would realize that you don't have implicit agreement.
Sure, buddy, you do that. Whatever helps you feel clever.
A doctor driving around vaccinating whoever he can find at their house is clearly not how you want to distribute the vaccine in early December, it's not going to get to the most at risk people as soon as it can and any issues that arise are a huge liability problem unless he can fix it with what's in his car.
At the same time not having any plan or procedure of how to use the remaining vaccines or how to decide if the last batch should be opened is only going to create bad scenarios so you can't blame the person following the instructions for having a bad outcome if that's all you gave.
What's really messed up about this (and probably why the response had to be overly strong) is it was made into a news story about how he maliciously took the vaccines for his own use when really it's a story about how the vaccine rollout procedure wasn't good enough and left him in a shitty situation.
No, but it is absolutely what I would want any doctor to do if the alternative was throwing away COVID vaccine doses.
Like, I literally think this should be the standard policy. Do absolutely everything within your power to never waste a dose, ever. If that means getting in your car and driving around town, you need to go do that, no question.
1) everything still happens in a controlled setting
2) fair distribution is still ensured
3) you're not making unrealistic demands of a person who has to give out doses every night to then drive around town without a plan
Obviously none of these are the fault of the guy taking the fall though, it's process work that needed to be done by the people that fired him and charged him. That's why the response is a bit strong, he wasn't the one that created the problem and he seemed to try to talk to anyone he could reach about a better solution. At the same time that doesn't mean this was a good outcome or what should happen.
I.e. if 9 doses have to go to waste to safely improve the distribution process as a whole it's probably better than telling doctors to independently try to take it on the road unplanned.
If two people cancel one morning because, I don't know, a storm knocked down a bunch of trees in their area, and you've tried your future appointments list, do you now have to phone the other six patients and ask them to reschedule too? Or do you have a nurse go out and find two people off the street who want a COVID vaccine, and bring them to the office asap? Remember that the vaccines have a limited shelf-life even in the freezer, and that the ultimate goal is to get shots into arms as quickly as possible.
You can optimize for speed, or you can optimize for equity. I don't think we should throw out equity, but we should lean towards speed.
> it's a story about how the vaccine rollout procedure wasn't good enough and left him in a shitty situation.
I wish that people like the administrator who fired him and the prosecutor who charged him would have used better judgement. This logic is not "reasonable" given how extreme the outcome is.
It takes a lot of steadfast effort to go after someone like that knowing that it's going to be a PR nightmare (except perhaps on HN, where people will argue that it was "logical"). This story seems completely insane to me.
This is entirely reasonable, but it comes down to - what to do when faced with this situation? True, it's not going to get to the most at risk people, but what's the alternative?
After all, vaccination is not an emergency treatment, so it should be easy to avoid the situation in the article.
If the rules were changed to allow for this, you can easily imagine that some less ethical doctors would decide to break seals just before closing the clinic, and then vaccinating their family and friends because "it would be a shame to waste it".
I wouldn't necessarily object to that particular policy. It's a shame to waste perfectly good medicine in a pandemic, but would we feel the same if he had not found anybody vulnerable who was available, and instead ended up vaccinating his own children, who are fit and healthy? What if, instead, he taken the vaccine vial to Beverly Hills and called up the rich and famous to try and find someone who wanted to be vaccinated?
I think the prosecution in this case is wrong; and the authorities should have prepared well in advance to make use of spare vaccines in a fair way. But the motivation for the prosecution is understandable - a distribution policy exists to protect the equity of society, and bureaucracy is meant to be a guarantee of that equity.
He didn't create the situation. He just tried to do the best that he could given the situation that he was in.
No, the point I'm making is that his actions were outside of the system we use as a society to ensure fairness. He could still have distributed the vaccine fairly - but he also could have done it unfairly. The concern comes from the lack of due process.
>You’d rather see life saving medicine trashed rather than go into a human being’s arm? How can you defend that position?
This is a strawman, so thankfully I don't have to defend it.
Ultimately, the point is more this one: if you view this with a utilitarian mindset, then you may feel that the ends justified the doctor's means. But the rule of law is deontological, not utilitarian - both because it simplifies decision-making in the justice system, and because it protects people from utilitarian injustice. And from that perspective, the doctor acted unjustly in bypassing policy, even if the outcome was good - and that's what the prosecutor is concerned with.
Citation needed please, the article said that he followed the policy of not letting the vaccine go to waste.
The county prosecutor maintains that policy directed him to act differently, since that is the basis of her case against him. So, from the prosecutor's perspective, he bypassed policy. Since I'm making a point about the prosecutor's motivations, it's charitable to see this from the view of the prosecutor.
But in this case, the policy would still be wrong if it encouraged wasting vaccine that could have been used to save lives.
It's frankly bizarre to see people value bureaucracy over lives.
> In the number of words usually taken to describe an allegation of retail shoplifting, the State attempts, for the first time, to criminalize a doctor’s documented administration of vaccine doses during a public health emergency,” Bynum wrote in his order, adding the prosecutor’s affidavit was “riddled with sloppiness and errors.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/am...
Honestly? As long as he made a good faith effort to distribute the doses he had available, then hell yeah I endorse him vaccinating any warm body available to him, whether it's his family or not.
Now if he took money in exchange? That should be a criminal offense and he should loose his medical license. But if he walked into a grocery store with an hour left and a rich person just happened to get the shot, so be it, as long as no favor was exchanged.
In my opinion this whole mess is, at least in part, a fault of those above him. There should be a standby list with a clear expectancy of urgency. If you get a call at 2am, you either show up or get passed by. Fill it with all the front-line workers in the county or something like that first, then start pulling in the public.
There should be _no_ shortage of people willing to take this, we're just spending so much time worrying about who gets it and not enough time worrying about ensuring that every last dose is effectively used and not wasted.
The current distribution policy does not exist for the equity of society, it puts the most at-risk first. That makes sense, but it shouldn't be the point at which we draw the line. For herd immunity to take effect, 70%+ of the population must be resistant, so a few people getting the vaccine out of order shouldn't cause this much of an outrage when done without malice.
I agree, but I think if I were in the position of having an extra dose that needed a warm body I'd try to find someone outside my family to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
At no point should this vaccine be wasted, people have literally given their lives to save others during this pandemic. Throwing away doses because it looks improper is an insult and a disservice to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of others.
It's not a popular opinion, but I think anyone who's administering the vaccine should have their immediate family added to the standby list anyways, if not placed in the current phase.
Eliminate the temptation for these people to want to go outside the normal channels to protect your family, and you eliminate the risk of impropriety.
That's not to say it shouldn't be rationed and planned so the high-risk populous suffers though. It's ultimately a contentious line we have to walk, since supply is limited and demand is high, though not as geospatially dense as we'd like in all cases. It makes efficient delivery to those in rural or less well served areas much harder, which brings about intended and unintended inequalities to the front.
If he'd made an honest attempt at offering it to vulnerable people first and couldn't find any takers, then I'd be fine with him giving it to his healthy children.
> What if, instead, he taken the vaccine vial to Beverly Hills and called up the rich and famous to try and find someone who wanted to be vaccinated?
That's worse, but I think it's unfair to offer these as the comparisons to what he actually did - offered it to first responders, healthcare workers, and finally the most vulnerable people he could find, all on his own time, money, and effort.
> * But the motivation for the prosecution is understandable - a distribution policy exists to protect the equity of society, and bureaucracy is meant to be a guarantee of that equity. *
Unfortunately, "equity" is a nebulous term here. The bureaucracy took one look at the list of names, saw a bunch of brown South Asian names and assumed this was unfair - why? Was their net worth written next to them? Could they have taken this step with a latino doctor and all the names were latino names - or with a black doctor?
> a distribution policy exists to protect the equity of society
Not really - the policy was exists in most places heavily favors the most vulnerable, not equitable racial distribution. There is some overlap between those two groups, for sure.
They're not comparisons. They are hypotheticals, intended to explore the range of possibilities that people would allow or oppose.
If people want to argue that the doctor was right to go out and distribute the vaccine ad-hoc, I think they should consider not just the actual result, but also counterfactuals, and whether in those counterfactual cases the actions would still be "justified". By returning to the real events, you're avoiding that consideration.
>Not really - the policy was exists in most places heavily favors the most vulnerable, not equitable racial distribution.
I did not mean "equity" in terms of "equitable racial distribution". I meant "equity" in the nebulous way of "fairness".
I agree that we must consider counterfactuals, but we can still only judge him by his actions, not hypothetical scenarios. Considering counterfactuals should help guide policy, not punishment.
> I did not mean "equity" in terms of "equitable racial distribution". I meant "equity" in the nebulous way of "fairness".
So how do we determine a particular list of recipients was "equitable" or not? While I agree with the idea that equity should mean fairness, I would offer that unfortunately in America that notion begins and ends with "equitable racial distribution".
If he can get from Texas to Beverly Hills in six hours, I'm fine with it. Every shot in an arm is a step closer to ending this thing. I'd rather it get couriered to Bill Gates than dropped in a trash can.
I don't understand why people make arguments like this. Throwing them away and giving them to friends and family aren't the only two options. There's a whole swath of acceptable and achievable options.
Giving doses to friends and family is a pretty bright ethical line. I don't think arresting him is the right call. But there shouldn't be much dispute that he acted wrongly here.
With a six hour window, it's unlikely he's gonna be able to invent a fair queuing system on his own, and get applicants to it. The article indicates he tried first with EMS, police, etc. at the vaccination location.
There should be state-wide efforts at this; a "we might call you at 2am to ask you if you can be to the hospital by 3am for a shot" list.
Nobody expects him to come up with a perfectly fair queueing system on the spot. He should have done that sometime in the 6 months he had to prepare for the rollout. Even if we overlook that, using your position of public trust for personal benefit or for the benefit of your friends is a bright line you are not supposed to cross. And it is a bright line that is there for good reason and should be enforced.
Why would the nurse open a new vial when they know they are about to close? That is very reckless, considering that vaccination is not time critical. That person could just come back tomorrow.
Source: I work at a medical school, and was told this by the doctor managing the vaccination line. He walks up and down the line, counting the number of people who showed up and opens the vials accordingly, but he's not in a position to ask anybody to come the next day. At least with Moderna, it's 10 doses per vial. Even though my employer had sufficient vaccine supply for us, our hospital was overrun with COVID cases in early January and medical staff to actually perform the vaccination was in short supply. The senior medical students were recruited to help out, and even then it would take many weeks to cover our staff. I actually got vaccinated at a different site 30 miles away, but I doubt this is an option available to most people. If you miss your appointment you're screwed.
Give me a break.
The guy started work before dawn. The countdown started after 6 PM. He had 6 hours to find 10 eligible recipients that met the guidelines. Most that he found were strangers.
He gave the last dose to his wife after he had only found 9, and it was after midnight. It is easy to sit in an armchair and say that he should have found someone else. But how?
The guy is a hero who is going above and beyond what his job requires, and not a criminal.
Go to the nearest grocery store/ Firehouse / police station and give them to front line workers.
If he were turning away people from the vaccine site and squirreling away vaccines for friends and family that would be a bright line, but that's not what happened here at all.
Please don’t make statements like this, it is against the rules.
“Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.”
I think it would be an easy to fix thing: Have a list of extra people available if you end up with an extra dose.
It shouldn't be that hard, we had a year for preparing for this...
https://abc13.com/health/gov-greg-abbott-receives-covid-19-v...
At least when Biden (referenced in the article) got his, he exceeded the age requirements in most states.
The claim that they are doing it to show people its safe is a bit cynical IMHO.
But in spain the cases that have surfaced are of mainly politicians who got the shot and tried to keep quiet about it, which think we can all agree its bad.
In the US much of the vaccine resistance is a result of the news/propaganda channels a particular party (which Greg Abbot belongs to) uses to generate fear and doubt in order to win elections. So they generate the problem, then they get to help show its safe? I mean they aren't going to convince any of the hardcore conspiracy theory people they weren't just injected with saline.
Plus, many of the politicians assume they are more valuable than the political system which is designed to replace them every couple years says they are. Particularly in TX where the governorship is unusually weak.
> we had a year for preparing for this...
I hear this argument a lot. Health officials have been overworked just trying to stay on top of the pandemic.
They aren't experts in logistics. The only way to have been more prepared is already have a plan pre-pandemic. Once you're in the middle, it's chaos.
I suspect the nytimes is interested in pushing the racism angle more than anything.
So he prayed about it, and God offered him a wish. Did he want a cow of his own? "No," he said, "I want you to kill my neighbor's cow!"
It only seems like one dose here but that’s how corruption always begins and then one day you become Russia.
It underlines a large ideological difference in politics that exists...let’s help people in front of us here and now...vs let’s do things that will maximize benefits on the long run and reduce risk of negative consequences.
A wasted vial here and there is nothing compares to thousands wasted via corruption.
Then we'd have fewer vaccines expire before they can be used.
This wasn't a problem because a doctor vaccinated people out of order. This was a problem because the hospital failed to find recipients for the vaccines they had. If you're going to make an example of someone, make an example of the hospital.
> Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
Sadly the US has now a system where everyone with any responsibilities has zero authority and everyone with authority has zero accountability.
[0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
> Exactly, he said he was told.
Amazing. I wonder how much of the charges levied against him are a desperate attempt to avoid being sued for unfair dismissal
I have seen this in the planned economy I grew up in, which was unable to provide even toilet paper to its people - but it was ok, because we didn’t have any food either.
Our blindness to the simplicity, obviousness and logic of the market laws and our obsession with the forced, unnatural "fairness" and "equality" make us relearn this lesson the hard way, by paying the price. Unfortunately this time the price is in lives.
This is ludicrous. The “free market” isn’t for everything.
The US is going to get enough shots in part because the companies are US companies.
No, I'm suggesting people should get the vaccine based on how much money they are willing to spend on it. Just like everything else. This would in effect reduce demand (most people would decide a mask is enough protection or to simply wait) and make sure that only people needing the vaccine (or their sponsors) would spend the money for it.
The free market works for even more essentials like food, clothes and shelter, but suddenly is not for vaccines?!
Only Moderna is a US company. BioNTech and AstraZeneca are European. The vaccine's very existence is owed to the free market and private enterprise. The failure to distribute and use the vaccine is solely due to governmental intervention.
I wonder how the market would price it.
If there was a "vaccination passport" in operation to let those vaccinated travel freely, I would be happy to pay up to 1/2K to jump-the-queue. It's a minor premium on the expense of an overseas summer vacation.
Would also be happy if part of the fee included a subsidy for low-income.
However, morally, I would prefer to wait for first-line responders and elderly at-risk to be prioritized with first doses. Which kind of leads us back to where we started with government prioritization.
Would be interesting to see how an SV startup revenue team would price it with their huge data points on pricing models. Worth an A/B test perhaps.
If it was a free market then the vaccine would cost 10k and few of those who benefit most would get it. That's not efficient or fair.
In a free market the vaccine would’ve cost 10k for a month while producers would’ve been scrambling to increase availability and production to take advantage of this amazing opportunity. Pretty soon after the price would’ve dropped at a greatly increased availability.
Right now the vaccine is free and very few lucky ones can get it. And it’s been months.
Ignoring the moral issues with distributing a live saving vaccine based on who has enough money, I don’t think that free market pricing would have made things much faster.
It’s not like any random person can get into the business of complex vaccine manufacturing. The companies and the government have already been scrambling to get it out faster but even if you believe that there is/was more room to incentivize the 2(?) main companies making the vaccine then again the government(s) could just say pay the companies more/less based on the timing of doses.
However I really don’t think that additional profit motive was a factor here. If there was more room to say build another factory at some high cost, I find it hard to believe that these companies would decide not to and not offer governments an offer to expand capacity (eg. we can give you X doses and bump you up but we need more money to build the factory).
I would be very surprised if more money would have helped produce more vaccines. Canada is burning a billion a day to keep everything in lockdown - money does not seem relevant to the current situation. Adding it in just makes everyone pay more for the same limited amount of vaccines.
Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's government chose. We'll be paying the price for years to come...
> Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's government chose. We'll be paying the price for years to come...
How does this relate to money being a limiting factor for vaccine production?
Secondly, the government can purchase the vaccine at “market price” and then distribute it at a fixed price. There’s no need to have price gouging (at least given a certain supply in the US)
No 'we' ( meaning the vast majority) do not relearn. The _never_ will.
We just need a small caveat in the rules that only people the doctor doesn't know (either directly or through a mutual acquaintance) are allowed to receive an unplanned shot in this manner, to eliminate the incentive to do it on purpose. As well as some accountability after the fact, depending on the details of the case.
The outcome of this is fairly tragic, I consider this doctor somewhat of a hero and here he is being punished by unthinking bureaucrats. What a shame.
Edit: To be clear, I don't know whether these left over bottles were going to go to waste or if they had contingency plans to use them.
In Israel, before vaccines were made available to the entire public, people created Facebook groups reporting clinics which had spare vaccines, nurses would even go outside and offer random passerbys an option to get vaccinated.
It may seem simple but your scheme a fraught with equity issues. The ability to respond in a timely manner or arrive within a limited timeframe such as you propose is likely to reflect the luxury of privilege. And yes, equity concerns are more important than concerns over whatever minimal delays or waste they create.
We have seen other places where the rules were followed and doses thrown away. As far as I'm concerned any bureaucrat who ordered that should be thrown in the same dumpster.
If it's night time and you have six hours to administer the doses, you have to administer them in six hours. To someone you can contact in six hours. At night.
Your position just boils down to "I'd rather let people die than be open to a bureaucratic exception in a desperate emergency situation in the middle of a pandemic."
It's monstrous, quite frankly. You should reconsider.
For instance, one simply needs documented evidence that 1) the right populations were clearly made aware of vaccine location and time, 2) communications went out to "in-scope" target audiences at least X hours before the doses expired, and 3) if vaccines are at threat of expiring once they are - let's say - two hours from expiring then those that control that particular supply should do everything they can to use them.
And while this solution is a bit reductive, it's honestly not that reductive; this is a solvable problem. People on Hacker News solve much, much, much harder problems than this.
And I'd rather 20% of vaccines go to the wrong people than 5% of vaccines go in the trashbin, personally.
How? If X people made appointments in a day, then exactly X vaccines should be distributed for that day. Leftover vaccines will only be distributed after all those appointments are over, so it is impossible for any of the X people(assuming they arrived on time) to lose their vaccine.
This is a failure of management from the very top, and people lower down getting the blame.
It is simply insane to me that most (all?) states haven't used the past six months to build proper portals that can do this. This doesn't even need to be some complex medical-records-transfer monstrosity -- allow people to put in their own information (or the information on non-tech-savvy relatives or neighbors), and verify them at the point of injection.
Here in Massachusetts, an extremely tech-savvy state, run by a health insurance exec, there is absolutely no centralized way to register yourself, and no way to put yourself on any kind of list at all, besides calling up individual vaccination sites once you become eligible. And there is no centralized list of what vaccination sites have openings (though a private citizen was able to make one via web scraping).
Already when you book an appointment, I believe, you simply state why you're eligible for the current group and when you get to the injection site they double-check that (to the best of their ability). I don't believe that any states are requiring verification that you are, e.g., a smoker.
So you should be able to just input your data, your age, if you are a frontline worker, whatever, and check the box that you have 2+ of the listed medical conditions. When you get to the site, the triage person can check that.
This is no more or less security than currently exists, it just centralizes it.
Having a registry that I submit info to, get it verified, and shared to doctors is probably easier because of HIPAA. Because at least there’s a common standard that system operators can plan around and there’s at least some protection.
You would think that state's had no advanced knowledge of a vaccine. In Maryland (my state) the state health director published a "white paper" on what steps they were planning on taking to vaccinate. Then a few weeks later he retired.
The question should not be "why did he give the doses to people he knows?", it should be "why were there even doses available for him to do this with?". Someone failed to make sure every available dose of a highly demanded vaccine had a patient. That is the real problem and it likely has nothing to do with this doctor.
It's a shame the article doesn't name the hospital he worked for because it looks like they're using him as a scapegoat for their own failings.
But honestly I'm not surprised. Lockdowns and isolation have turned some of my more reasonable acquaintances into rabid social media junkies who do nothing but judge anyone for the smallest social infraction.
If anything, social media is going after the maliciously overzealous prosecutor on this.
The people attracted to these bureaucratic positions select for rule following. It’s a reinforcing thing. Those that follow the policy are rewarded and move up. Pragmatic people sometimes bend the rules and sooner or later are pushed out.
These bureaucrats would rather see people die than for there to be a break in sacred government policy. We need to do whatever we can to keep such people from being in positions of power.
Where I live, there are about 10 different places that vaccinate, between county governments, pharmacies and hospitals. All of them have separate registration systems. Meanwhile, appointments go quickly and appointment availability is often announced on Twitter, which is probably isn't the best place for the 65+ crowd.
What they needed to do starting in December is create a state-wide (or at least county-wide) registration system. Essentially model it as a priority queue with different buckets:
1) covid ward healthcare workers
2) other front line healthcare workers
3) 65+
4) preexisting conditions
5) etc.
You can disagree about which buckets go first, but that's not my point here. This should have been setup and publicized well before the vaccine rollout started. Now, you get a sense of exactly who wants to be vaccinated, so you don't get wasted doses when 45% of a nursing home's staff doesn't want the shot.
You also ask people how far they would be willing to drive for a shot. I know people who drove a few hours. I know others who didn't want to drive more than 20 minutes. So it's relevant. You also ask times of day that people are willing to be vaccinated and if they want to be notified if earlier slots open up.
Once vaccines are actually available, you have a central queue and you pick randomly within each priority group. So let's say you are up to 65+ adults in the general population (which is a large group). 1000 appointments open up at a hospital in zip code 12345. You send out a text message and email to 1400 (since not all 1400 are going to respond to the text message) randomly selected people in zip code 12345 or who are willing to drive there. For some elderly people, you might need to make phone calls. You give people some time to respond and if they don't, then add them back to the pool and send messages to more people until you get all slots filled.
There are thousands of people in any major city who would drop what they are doing and run out to get the vaccine on a moment's notice. With a better system in place, this should never have fallen on the doctor in the first place.
There is a country-wide registry of everyone (already existing, because the NHS covers everyone's healthcare) and everyone is assigned a place in line to get vaccinated based on their estimated clinical risk, from highest to lowest.
Everyone gets a letter in the mail when their turn comes up allowing them to register for any of the currently open vaccine appointments at one central website. There's little to no fight to book slots because the appointment system is paced by the letters.
When a whole risk group is nearly completely vaccinated (so far, that includes age 80+, 75+, 70+, and social care workers), then that group switches over to open registration to encourage any stragglers to get vaccinated.
Anyone who has an invitation letter or is in one of the nearly-finished groups can get an appointment scheduled on a simple central website or by calling their local doctor: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavir...
The priority queue of people left to vaccinate (and the logic behind it) is widely publicized and progress through the steps widely tracked in the media:
1. residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
2. all those 80 years of age and over and frontline health and social care workers
3. all those 75 years of age and over
4. all those 70 years of age and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
5. all those 65 years of age and over
6. all individuals aged 16 years to 64 years with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious disease and mortality
7. all those 60 years of age and over
8. all those 55 years of age and over
9. all those 50 years of age and over
It is estimated that taken together, these groups represent around 99% of preventable mortality from COVID-19.
The UK is currently working on group #5 and catching any remaining people left in #1 - #4.
My point is not that the UK is doing everything perfectly (obviously not). It's just that a mass vaccination system like this is doable and easily could have been done in the US if the government was more together over the last year. And organization works - the UK is not only significantly ahead of the US in number of shots administered per capita, but it also has a much higher percentage of age 70+ citizens reached (well over 90%) while the US vaccinations so far are more spread across age ranges.
That's the thing that should be illegal here.
The chain of people who fired this guy got where they were by following rules and covering their butts. People don't wind up managing important things for government by bending rules where appropriate, assuming responsibility and using discretion. The system either marginalizes, removes or crushes the spirit of those kinds of people.
As much as I strongly believe that rigid rules hurt good people, I believe it's a false dichotomy to assert that either he takes the vaccine home or it goes to waste. Further, it is important to maintain some semblance of public trust during this process and the optics of driving across one of the largest cities in America, by one of the largest medical centers in the country, and taking the vaccine home to find eligible people is not good. Now, yes, it's not quite as easy as calling up a hospital as asking if they could use it, but it doesn't sound like he tried.
Now, even if we believe he did the right thing, I'll still stress that there will always be a contention between optics, trust, and corruption. Say I work as the mayor of a city and my brother really is the best contractor for the job, do I hire him? I'll contend that's not exactly an easy question and neither is the case with this physician and the vaccine.
I don't see a specific, viable, knowable-at-the-time alternative course of action Dr. Gokal could have taken, from you or anyone else. And the events in question happened over a month ago. Dr. Gokal's boss has had over a month to BS about what Dr. Gokal should have done, and failed to come up with anything. Dr. Gokal had six hours.
> Say I work as the mayor of a city and my brother really is the best contractor for the job, do I hire him? I'll contend that's not exactly an easy question and neither is the case with this physician and the vaccine.
I am disgusted with the laid-back, bureaucratic attitude so many people seem to have about this vaccination campaign. It is truly no surprise anymore that we have managed this pandemic so disastrously, and let so many people die needlessly.
Dr. Gokal had six hours to get ten doses into vulnerable people's arms. It was night time and he had no guidance from management on how to avoid wasting those doses. Wasted doses mean dead bodies.
Do you understand that? And after understanding that, can you explain to me how armchair quarterbacking Dr. Gokal is anything but unconscionable?
This is not a time to gab with the angels on our shoulders about optics, about whether we look like perfect little boys and girls. It is time to actually be good. It is time to save as many lives as we can. Dr. Gokal did that, he made no attempt to hide it, and he paid a terrible price. If you're going to sit in judgment of people, it should be the horrible bureaucrats who dare to judge him, when it was THEIR failures that put him in this position.
While freestanding ERs have a number of issues, there is a single attending on staff that is extremely easy to get hold of by another physician. He could have called at least one of them to see if there were eligible patients in the facility that would accept the vaccine. Yes, this takes time, but note that depending on traffic it takes about an hour to drive back to Sugar Land. I believe that if he would have dispersed the vaccines at one of those facilities, the story and perception of this physician would have been dramatically different.
My point in bringing this up is that there were other realistic options that he could have taken. It is not quite as simple as take the vaccine home or it goes to waste.
Do we know if those ERs would administer vaccines from another hospital's punctured vial in their facilities? Do we know how long it would take to get the answer to that question, trimming off the 42 minutes per person Dr. Gokal had to find, administer, and properly document the vaccine injection? And at the end of all that, would there be enough high-priority individuals on hand, ready and willing to be vaccinated? Was that clearly better than calling up people the doctor knew, and knew to be vulnerable?
Yeah, I don't think you know any of that. It's fine to speculate about the hypothetical optimal course of action in this situation, but it's deeply wrong to judge Dr. Gokal without certain knowledge of all those things.
With respect to the freestanding ERs, I would contend that they would probably take it. A friend of mine owns a couple in Houston. My wife used to work off and on with a different company at them as the attending physician. That does not make me an expert in this area, but I can say with absolute confidence that getting hold of the physician on duty quickly with this kind of matter is guaranteed. Whether they would want the liability to give the vaccines is unknown to me. The next time I see my friend, I'll ask him because I'm genuinely curious.
I'll also mention that there are certain cultural biases that come into play here as well. I spent years doing federal contract work and it was well ingrained into me that avoiding the appearance of impropriety is important for a well functioning organization. As much as the organizations that I worked with don't want waste, the bias is to side with clean, unreproachable conduct even if this is more wasteful. Not all of the government works this way and the reality of life is that this isn't always so easy. I mention this because that kind of bias suggests a different way of looking at the problem and provides a different set of solutions. That's not a value judgement to say that these solutions are better or worse, but an implicit assumption that there has to be a different way.
The problem with this, which few in the government seem to understand, is that knowingly and wilfully letting people die needlessly in a pandemic is deeply reproachable conduct. Personally, I'd actually call such conduct despicable. But my personal standards of conduct could perhaps be much higher than average, so we can leave it at reproachable as a basline.
Other articles say that he was punished for violating a protocol which required that expiring vaccines be returned to a hub site (i.e. throw them away and let people die or be punished.)
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/am...
Considering that grand juries would indict a ham sandwhich, this seems like the prosecutor is reaching just to prolong the process and pain this doctor is going through. Even assuming the best case argument for the prosecutor that he did “steal it”, he vaccinated 10 people with expiring vials. More realistically, given that it was only 10 expiring vials that went to eligible patients, the doctor should be commended for driving around and finding people who needed it. Who the fuck cares if it was primarily his own community or one of the vials went to his sick wife?
This just looks like the DA was caught being overly aggressive (perhaps even racist given the comments in the article) and is just trying to save face. Dollars to donuts the case is thrown away and I hope the doctor countersues for malicious prosecution, although more realistically he’ll take a plea to avoid going to trial and end this nightmare.
I am not American. When I hear about grand juries in American media, it is usually when they refuse to indict in a case of brutality or killing by police officers, even though there is clear evidence about the incident. It seems that grand juries never indict anyone, not the other way around. Where do grand juries' biases lie in reality?
A huge improvement is probably actually to just remove the grand jury. That way prosecutors can't hide behind the "well I wanted to indict but the grand jury didn't let me" while removing the guilty by association act of "well a jury clearly thought the indictment had merit".
Except for one thing: If I am the lucky recipient of this vaccine, ahead of schedule (since I am under 75 and have no comorbidities), then what about the second dose? Do I have to get lucky a second time, the right amount of time after my first dose? (My understanding is that there have been no studies of delayed second doses.) Or am I given priority because I've had the first dose?
https://thearcca.org/california-establishes-vaccine-advisory...
And seriously on the other hand, most jobs are not potentially life and death situations. There are few, if any parallel situations to this. Maybe it would be akin to parking a company vehicle incorrectly so you could stop and help an injured person.
A lot of this "it was policy" argument fails when Harris County failed to produce evidence of said policy and its instruction.
The manager's pet getting first pick of the dumpster at a small machine shop is very different than the same thing at a ship yard.
> After that, he said, the message was: “Just put it in people’s arms. We don’t want any doses to go to waste. Period.”
It sounds like not wasting the limited vaccine was actual policy (possibly unofficial policy, but the message he was receiving).
And this would be the right policy. It's absolutely correct to get vaccines into people before the expire, so long as you hav correctly exhausted all means available to you of finding the right people.
The issue is that the states haven't made it easy for providers to find the right people when you have six hours remaining to use a vaccine.
> Dr. Gokal said he called a Harris County public health official in charge of operations to report his plans to find 10 people to receive the remaining doses. He said he was told, simply: OK.
This lines up with what I know from family members doing vaccinations in other areas.
> a prosecutor told him by email that there were no written protocols from late December; nor had a written wait list yet been found.
And giving short life vaccines to people with co-morbidities during a pandemic is a world of difference than grocery store food. I'm not sure why we're even comparing the two.
Not saying it's good - but there are reasons these policies are in place.
It can also result in the situations we see here which sounds like this doctor had the best of intentions and is being punished for it.
If they act unethically, there is a built in method to address this through the licensing boards that regulate them.
Criminal behavior is different, but the Judge that heard the case completely rejected the argument that the behavior was criminal.
>On Dec. 22, Dr. Gokal joined a conference call in which state health officials explained the protocols for administering the recently approved Moderna vaccine. The 10 or 11 doses in a vial are viable for six hours after the seal is punctured.
>Dr. Gokal said the advice was to vaccinate people eligible under the 1(a) category (health care workers and residents in long-term-care facilities), then those under the 1(b) category (people over 65 or with a health condition that increases risk of severe Covid-related illness).
>After that, he said, the message was: “Just put it in people’s arms. We don’t want any doses to go to waste. Period.”
What he did was explicitly ordered by the government. It is what the health department told everybody to do, in no uncertain terms.
and... vaccines for deadly stuff that people NEED/MUST receive LOL