“It is much smaller than we would like it to be,” he said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, co-founder of The COVID Prison Project, a group of public health scientists that compiles and studies virus data from correctional institutions. “It is even more damaging, since they work in crowded environments where there are many people at a disproportionate risk of suffering seriously and dying from COVID.”
State inmates have been significantly more open to shooting. About 69 percent of the nearly 6,200 prisoners who received inoculation received an initial dose of the Moderna vaccine, which the state began providing for most prisoners and correctional officials on January 18.
The Massachusetts Federated Union of Correction Officers, which represents more than 3,000 DOC employees, said the decision to ultimately vaccinate is up to the worker.
“We encourage our members to be vaccinated, but we also recognize that vaccination is an individual right and decision and should never be obligatory or forced upon us,” the board said in a statement.
The Department of Correction said that its refusal numbers do not tell the whole story because the count includes workers who chose to be vaccinated in external facilities and workers with medical contraindications who refused inoculation for health reasons.
It was unclear whether the DOC was tracking these numbers and, if so, how. The agency would only say that off-site vaccination information “is confidential to the employee.”
“DOC will continue to offer the vaccine until all inmates and officials who choose to be vaccinated are vaccinated, including those who changed their minds after previously refusing,” said the agency.
A MassINC survey in late November found that black and Latino residents are more hesitant to apply for the vaccine because of the government’s long-standing distrust of health issues. Republicans and regular churchgoers are also among the least eager to be first in line for a vaccine, partly due to skepticism about whether the vaccine has been tested exhaustively.
Police and prisoner advocates cited misinformation, distrust of vaccinations, questions about safety and efficacy and a history of unethical research and medical practices targeting people of color as reasons given to refuse the vaccine.
Other prison systems across the country have reported a lukewarm response from workers who received the vaccine. In California, a correctional officer told state lawmakers that less than half of his workers had been vaccinated by the end of January.
The situation is similar in Iowa, where nearly half of the state’s prison officials refused the vaccine, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker went beyond federal health guidelines, prioritizing correctional and prison officials for the first voluntary COVID-19 injections.
The division in the acceptance of the vaccine between prisoners and employees has become a problem in a collective action aimed at reducing the prison population to delay the spread of COVID-19.
In a lawsuit, lawyers for Prisoners’ Legal Services, which represents prisoners in the lawsuit, said that “the risk of spreading between unvaccinated and imprisoned employees remains.”
“It is worrying that so many employees have so far refused the vaccine,” the group’s executive director, Elizabeth Matos said in a statement. “We are excited about the greater number of prisoners who have had the vaccine. But the significantly low absorption, especially for the team bringing the virus, means that there will continue to be a very significant threat from the coronavirus spreading and causing illness and death in these congregated environments. “
About 3,000 DOC inmates tested positive for COVID-19, including 95 inmates with active cases of the virus on Wednesday, the figures show.
In January, DOC offered good credit to prisoners who completed vaccine education and received the vaccine. The offer, however, was terminated earlier this month after the Baker administration said the memo was not consistent with its prison sentence reduction policies, according to Prisoners’ Legal Services.
The rate of refusal of vaccination among workers in at least one municipal prison also appears high. The Bristol County sheriff’s office said more than 70% of employees refused the vaccine, the figures show.
Refusal rates at other county facilities are less clear because two sheriffs are not tracking refusals and four other sheriffs have yet to report any data to a special master, who was appointed by the Supreme Court to track COVID-19 in the state correctional system. .
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on twitter @lauracrimaldi.