NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) – A Tennessee advisory committee tasked with deciding how residents should receive COVID-19 vaccine has acknowledged that state detainees are at high risk, but has concluded that prioritizing them for inoculation it could be a “public”. relationship nightmare. ”
The result: Detainees are in the latest vaccine-scheduled group in the state, even though the pandemic vaccine planning stakeholder group has concluded that “if left untreated, they will be a vector of transmission to the general population,” according to doorstep records. closed commissions. obtained by The Associated Press. To date, there is no firm timeline for the launch of prison vaccines.
The debate in Tennessee reflects a problem facing states at the national level as they launch life-saving vaccines: whether to give priority to a population seen by many at best as a later thought, separate from the public and, in worst case, as unworthy. Resistance comes even though medical experts have argued since the beginning of the pandemic that detainees have an extremely high risk of infection, given that they live in extremely close contact with each other and have a reduced capacity for social distance.
“It shows a lack of morality and an absence of empathy to allow someone to die or expose them to a higher risk, because they happen to be imprisoned. … Before anyone was ever imprisoned, they were someone’s children, mother, brother, father or sister and they remain so and should be considered, cared for and viewed as such, “said Jeannie Alexander, executive director of No Exceptions Prison Collective. a grassroots organization in Nashville.
Just a few months ago, as COVID-19 cases rose in the United States, the Associated Press and The Marshall Project calculated cumulative infection rates among detainee populations. The analysis found that by mid-December, 1 in 5 U.S. state and federal detainees tested positive for coronavirus, a rate four times higher than the general population. Since then, cases have decreased, but remain larger than the general population.
Tennessee ranks 24th in the country for COVID-19 prisoner cases. So far, 1 in 3 state detainees – more than 38,800 in total – have tested positive for the virus since the outbreak began to spread almost a year ago. More than 40 detainees died due to COVID-19.
So far, the state has inoculated an unknown number of correctional personnel – Tennessee does not make this information public as other states do – but there are no prisoners. Twenty-four states allowed at least part of their detainee population to be vaccinated, including those who qualified according to state age lines or had pre-existing health conditions, according to AP and Marshall Project data.
Sometimes, in the last year, some of the largest groups of coronaviruses in the United States have been in prisons in Tennessee, with hundreds of cases active in several facilities.
In the spring, Trousdale Turner Correctional, a private prison run by CoreCivic, Tennessee, saw about half of the 2,444 inmates who tested positive for coronavirus, while more than 1,100 inmates at the South Central Correctional Facility 1,700 contracted the virus. The state reported only 17 cases of positive prisoners since Friday. The visit has been suspended for months. The population of the state prison is around 30,000, the local prisons housing about 19,000.
The documents from the pandemic vaccine stakeholder planning group meetings underlined, in fact, the importance of the general public seeing that detainees “are people” who should be treated as “part of the community” and “if not treated, will be a vector of general population transmission. However, the documents acknowledge that the provision of the detainee vaccine would lead to “a lot of media investigations”.
The panel includes about 40 public health agencies, parliamentarians, health care coalitions, emergency management and other organizations. Because it serves in an advisory capacity, Tennessee law does not require a public meeting and there are no audio recordings of the meetings, according to the Department of Health. The PA obtained the notes of the meeting through a request for public records.
According to the documents, the group met for the first time, practically, on September 22, before the vaccines became available. The incarcerated population of Tennessee came during that meeting, when the committee talked about populations that could have been overlooked.
“You understand that it would be a (public relations) nightmare, but a possible responsibility to the state,” says a document, which is not attributed to anyone by name.
Later in December, when the group met to discuss raising certain age groups as well as teachers, detainees were again considered.
“If we are hit hard in prisons, it affects the whole community. The disease leaves the correction facilities and re-enters the general society as the detainees give up the sentence “, the document reads, adding that when the detainees suffer from the disease” the taxpayers are the ones who have to absorb the bill for treatment “.
Eventually, the correction workers and jailers were hit by one of the oldest slots, along with the first respondents. Meanwhile, detainees remained in the last eligible group. Even now, senior detainees who can qualify under state age are not yet immunized.
Tennessee currently ranks 47th among states in terms of the number of people it has vaccinated in the general population. Of the 7 million people in the state, more than 14% received at least one dose of vaccine, while more than 7% received both vaccines, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The state has increased eligibility for the vaccine in the past few weeks. Starting next week, the vaccine will become available to people aged 16 and over who have pre-existing conditions – such as cancer, hypertension, obesity and pregnancy – as well as caregivers and residents of households where frail children live. medical view.