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This is just Kafkaesque. People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. They're literally saying he should ha

This is just Kafkaesque. People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. This whole thing is a logistical clusterfuck and they're trying to throw this dude under the bus. It's obscene.

BeefySwain 6y ago
The really telling part to me is that (seemingly) no one from any of the organizations involved (the hospital and the prosecutors office) will come forward and outright say that what was done was immoral. They are all hiding behind a veneer of "what he did broke the rules and my job is to enforce them", which is about the weakest argument one can make in defense this sort of thing.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Covering your ass isn’t a weak defense for the underlings. There exists a leader(s) somewhere that made the rules and that can change the rules. They are the only ones responsible, and I don’t see why anyone else should stick their neck out and risk their income for it. 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).
  - grayhatter 6y ago
    Where does the moral line lie then? what's difference that makes 'just following orders' suddenly not apply? 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?
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      With the prosecutor. In a government, it starts with the politician. I don’t know why the article doesn’t state who is responsible for the rule making, but I’m always an advocate for more transparency. > 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.
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      > Where does the moral line lie then? 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.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  The DA who brought the case, Kim Ogg, is an elected official. Top Google result for her name is this campaign page: https://www.kim-ogg.com/ https://www.kim-ogg.com/. Further down the list is a news article about threatening employees with performance reviews to appear at a food drive for her political benefit. 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.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    I am a Houstonian and absolutely hate Ogg. She bills herself as the "most progressive DA" and therefore prosecutes/does not prosecute certain things based on their political appearance. That is not what a DA should be doing, and she is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the "progressive" left these days.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      Sounds like the embodiment of what's wrong with the US system of treating jobs like DA as elected posts.
    - adamesque 6y ago
      not to mention this is an insanely anti-progressive prosecution once you dig into the details. just dumb.
      - edbob 6y ago
        Why is this anti-progressive? It sounds like he's being prosecuted because he gave vaccines to lighter-skinned people. Kim Ogg wouldn't be prosecuting him if he'd given them all to dark-skinned Black people. 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.
- robin21 6y ago
  Why does it matter if what he did was immoral? Many things that are not immoral can have bad outcomes.
golemotron 6y ago
It makes sense when you think about it. Without the rules, there's excuse to -not- find the people the vaccine is meant for and use it yourself. 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.
- rjbwork 6y ago
  Reply.
  - golemotron 6y ago
    Ha.
- mrtranscendence 6y ago
  If there were a list of "people the vaccine is meant for", I'd tend to agree with your point. As it happened there was no such list, and his attempts to find front-line workers to give the vaccine to failed. He was unable to find "people the vaccine is meant for", so I'm willing to give him some leeway there.
- Igelau 6y ago
  People who don't give a hoot about the rules are more prone to be spreaders anyway. After medical staff, we have the prioritization of who should get vaccinated completely inverted.
- ajford 6y ago
  He did attempt to find the 'people the vaccine is meant for'. He just wasn't able to find enough on a tight timeline. 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.
treis 6y ago
>They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able 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.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  I don’t understand this take - it’s not like his friends and family were the first ones he offered the vaccine to.
  - whoisburbansky 6y ago
    The article says “acquaintances and strangers,” and his wife. If he was trying to prioritize family and friends you’d think he’d give it to his elderly dad right off the bat.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Throwing them away and giving them to friends and family aren't the only two options. 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.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    > Around 6:45 at night, as the event wound down, an eligible person arrived for a shot. A nurse punctured a new vial to administer the vaccine, which activated the six-hour time limit for the 10 remaining doses. 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.
ivanbakel 6y ago
> They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. 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.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > 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? 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.
- valarauko 6y ago
  > 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? 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.
underseacables 6y ago
It sounds like the problem you hear with restaurants wanting to give away unused, clean food to shelters, but forbidden by the health department.
- josefx 6y ago
  In Germany a tax office once got the great idea to collect taxes on food donations based on the cost of ingredients. As far as the law was concerned this was the correct way to handle a food donation, most tax offices just didn't consider it. The issue got resolved, but for some time any business that wanted to be on the safe side had to "sell" its donation for the symbolic price of one Mark. Early on this also resulted in businesses throwing away food instead of donating it.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Are charitable donations taxed in Germany?
    - josefx 6y ago
      Only as a side effect of existing taxes. When you buy food and then donate it you pay consumer centered taxes at the point of sale. When a company gives away food for free there was apparently a regulation that applied the taxes on the ingredients instead and in this case the tax office decided that this also applied to donations.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. 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".
zamadatix 6y ago
I think the logic is reasonable but the response is too strong. 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.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Presumably the fact that you're not allowed to drive around an give away the remaining doses like this is calculated to make doctors be more careful about when the open batches. 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".
- valarauko 6y ago
  > 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. 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?
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > it's a story about how the vaccine rollout procedure wasn't good enough and left him in a shitty situation. Nothing done at this scale and speed is going to be perfect. There's always going to be problems. 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.
robin21 6y ago
It seems like the guy was unlucky. But corruption is a really bad thing and I lean on the side of anti-corruption any day of the week. 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.
- timwaagh 6y ago
  Corruption is everywhere and unavoidable. Not that you shouldn't try to fight it but you should not be overzealous. For example this guy, he immigrated to the us. Impossible without money right? Except Pakistan has none so likely a family member helped him at some point. Corruption. He should have been denied a visum if we are being strict. Corruption can be prosecuted in specific cases when there is ample proof. In this case all there is is idle speculation. I don't know what a world without corruption would look like. As an extreme example I would not be able to buy flowers for my girlfriend anymore because doing so is a personal favour.
prepend 6y ago
I think the problem is that there are incentives to just keep finding 10 vaccines about to expire. 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.
- SamBam 6y ago
  I agree with you that that's the part that made it "look bad," but it sounds as if he truly did everything he could to give it to other people first, gave it to her only as a very last resort with minutes to go, and she was eligible anyway. 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.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I think that’s what the case will show with a conviction or acquittal. 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.

BeefySwain 6y ago

The really telling part to me is that (seemingly) no one from any of the organizations involved (the hospital and the prosecutors office) will come forward and outright say that what was done was immoral. They are all hiding behind a veneer of "what he did broke the rules and my job is to enforce them", which is about the weakest argument one can make in defense this sort of thing.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Covering your ass isn’t a weak defense for the underlings. There exists a leader(s) somewhere that made the rules and that can change the rules. They are the only ones responsible, and I don’t see why anyone else should stick their neck out and risk their income for it. 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).
- grayhatter 6y ago
  Where does the moral line lie then? what's difference that makes 'just following orders' suddenly not apply? 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?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    With the prosecutor. In a government, it starts with the politician. I don’t know why the article doesn’t state who is responsible for the rule making, but I’m always an advocate for more transparency. > 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.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    > Where does the moral line lie then? 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.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
The DA who brought the case, Kim Ogg, is an elected official. Top Google result for her name is this campaign page: https://www.kim-ogg.com/ https://www.kim-ogg.com/. Further down the list is a news article about threatening employees with performance reviews to appear at a food drive for her political benefit. 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.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  I am a Houstonian and absolutely hate Ogg. She bills herself as the "most progressive DA" and therefore prosecutes/does not prosecute certain things based on their political appearance. That is not what a DA should be doing, and she is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the "progressive" left these days.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    Sounds like the embodiment of what's wrong with the US system of treating jobs like DA as elected posts.
  - adamesque 6y ago
    not to mention this is an insanely anti-progressive prosecution once you dig into the details. just dumb.
    - edbob 6y ago
      Why is this anti-progressive? It sounds like he's being prosecuted because he gave vaccines to lighter-skinned people. Kim Ogg wouldn't be prosecuting him if he'd given them all to dark-skinned Black people. 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.
robin21 6y ago
Why does it matter if what he did was immoral? Many things that are not immoral can have bad outcomes.

golemotron 6y ago

It makes sense when you think about it. Without the rules, there's excuse to -not- find the people the vaccine is meant for and use it yourself. 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.

rjbwork 6y ago
Reply.
- golemotron 6y ago
  Ha.
mrtranscendence 6y ago
If there were a list of "people the vaccine is meant for", I'd tend to agree with your point. As it happened there was no such list, and his attempts to find front-line workers to give the vaccine to failed. He was unable to find "people the vaccine is meant for", so I'm willing to give him some leeway there.
Igelau 6y ago
People who don't give a hoot about the rules are more prone to be spreaders anyway. After medical staff, we have the prioritization of who should get vaccinated completely inverted.
ajford 6y ago
He did attempt to find the 'people the vaccine is meant for'. He just wasn't able to find enough on a tight timeline. 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.

treis 6y ago

>They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able 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.

endisneigh 6y ago
I don’t understand this take - it’s not like his friends and family were the first ones he offered the vaccine to.
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  The article says “acquaintances and strangers,” and his wife. If he was trying to prioritize family and friends you’d think he’d give it to his elderly dad right off the bat.
ceejayoz 6y ago
> Throwing them away and giving them to friends and family aren't the only two options. 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.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  > Around 6:45 at night, as the event wound down, an eligible person arrived for a shot. A nurse punctured a new vial to administer the vaccine, which activated the six-hour time limit for the 10 remaining doses. 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.

ivanbakel 6y ago

> They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. 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.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> 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? 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.
valarauko 6y ago
> 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? 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.

underseacables 6y ago

It sounds like the problem you hear with restaurants wanting to give away unused, clean food to shelters, but forbidden by the health department.

josefx 6y ago
In Germany a tax office once got the great idea to collect taxes on food donations based on the cost of ingredients. As far as the law was concerned this was the correct way to handle a food donation, most tax offices just didn't consider it. The issue got resolved, but for some time any business that wanted to be on the safe side had to "sell" its donation for the symbolic price of one Mark. Early on this also resulted in businesses throwing away food instead of donating it.
- SamBam 6y ago
  Are charitable donations taxed in Germany?
  - josefx 6y ago
    Only as a side effect of existing taxes. When you buy food and then donate it you pay consumer centered taxes at the point of sale. When a company gives away food for free there was apparently a regulation that applied the taxes on the ingredients instead and in this case the tax office decided that this also applied to donations.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. 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".

zamadatix 6y ago

I think the logic is reasonable but the response is too strong. 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.

Grustaf 6y ago
Presumably the fact that you're not allowed to drive around an give away the remaining doses like this is calculated to make doctors be more careful about when the open batches. 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".
valarauko 6y ago
> 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. 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?
crispyambulance 6y ago
> it's a story about how the vaccine rollout procedure wasn't good enough and left him in a shitty situation. Nothing done at this scale and speed is going to be perfect. There's always going to be problems. 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.

robin21 6y ago

It seems like the guy was unlucky. But corruption is a really bad thing and I lean on the side of anti-corruption any day of the week. 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.

timwaagh 6y ago
Corruption is everywhere and unavoidable. Not that you shouldn't try to fight it but you should not be overzealous. For example this guy, he immigrated to the us. Impossible without money right? Except Pakistan has none so likely a family member helped him at some point. Corruption. He should have been denied a visum if we are being strict. Corruption can be prosecuted in specific cases when there is ample proof. In this case all there is is idle speculation. I don't know what a world without corruption would look like. As an extreme example I would not be able to buy flowers for my girlfriend anymore because doing so is a personal favour.

prepend 6y ago

I think the problem is that there are incentives to just keep finding 10 vaccines about to expire. 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.

SamBam 6y ago
I agree with you that that's the part that made it "look bad," but it sounds as if he truly did everything he could to give it to other people first, gave it to her only as a very last resort with minutes to go, and she was eligible anyway. 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.
- prepend 6y ago
  I think that’s what the case will show with a conviction or acquittal. 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.