Opinion: Prisons are long-term care facilities. So why don’t inmates get priority for Covid-19 vaccination?
In the four-tier priority list for Covid-19 vaccination set out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, residents of long-term care facilities are at the top along with health care personnel — but not if those long-term care facilities are prisons, jails, and other detention centers.
The “science” behind that decision continues to baffle me. Had the Covid-19 pandemic struck six years earlier, during the time I spent serving time at York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., I would have been one of those inmates fretting about her time in line for the vaccine. During the H1N1 pandemic, I lived in one of the 11% of state prisons that didn’t get a supply of H1N1 vaccine in 2009 and 2010. I never got the shot and, quite frankly, never knew if I needed it or not.
