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Some County Jail Inmates See Vaccination as Ticket to a Better Life In the State Pen
“Common sense says they’ll choose those who’ve been vaccinated.”
LOS ANGELES The inmates huddled near the front or lingered on the bunk beds lining both sides of their narrow, crowded dorm at the Men’s Central Jail, listening as Lt. Sheriff Dwight Miley and nurse practitioner Marissa Negrete offered them covid vaccinations and answered their questions.
The pandemic has revealed many instances of haves and have-nots. Some people have benefited from years of good access to healthcare while others have not. Some people have had the luxury of staying at home to avoid the coronavirus while others have had to put their lives at risk to make a living.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is drawing another line in the sand between disparate groups, but this time there’s an easy way to make the jump:
Get vaccinated.
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The CDC’s newly revised mask guidelines divide people based on whether they’ve received a COVID-19 vaccine, my colleagues Amina Khan and Karen Kaplan report. The move shifts its messaging away from the negative ramifications of skipping the shot to the positive outcomes of rolling up your sleeve.
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The inmates huddled near the front or lingered on the bunk beds lining both sides of their narrow, crowded dorm at the Men’s Central Jail, listening as sheriff’s Lt. Dwight Miley and nurse practitioner Marissa Negrete offered them COVID-19 vaccinations and answered their questions.
Those who wanted the vaccine should line up at the door, Miley and Negrete said. They’d be taken into a short, cramped hallway where medical workers waited with loaded syringes.
The shot wasn’t mandatory, Miley said, but he encouraged them to get it by dangling a carrot that might seem odd to someone on the outside: Being vaccinated would help them get transferred more quickly to state prison.
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By the time Santos Ruiz heard from the prison doctor last July, his father had been at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco for two weeks and on a ventilator.
“We don’t think he’s going to make it,” he recalled her saying.
This was the first time Ruiz had heard that his father, a 61-year-old inmate at San Quentin State Prison, even had the virus.
“It wasn’t right,” Ruiz said. “They waited to a point where a person can’t talk, a person can’t communicate with his family that loved him.”
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As the pandemic has ravaged California prisons, some families say that officials have failed to inform them when their loved ones have been hospitalized with the virus receiving a call only when it might already be too late to say their goodbyes, act as surrogate decision-makers or provide critical emotional support.