MEDFORD, Ore. — A federal judge ordering state officials to immediately offer state prison inmates the COVID-19 vaccine. The judge’s ruling essentially says inmates should have already been offered the vaccine. It puts the inmates in the same group as long-term care facilities like nursing homes, places where people are living close together.
This moves adults in custody ahead of senior citizens who are supposed to start receiving the vaccine, next week. “It’s not necessarily jumping the line,” said Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Juan Chavez. “They’re in the same line now. Whereas before, they were told get behind 900,000 other people. As Americans, we have an obligation to people who are in custody. That’s something we decided in the founding of this country in 1781, in our Constitution.”
“We can’t be cruel and unusually punishing people that we’ve sentenced. Because of a crime that might have been committed. So nobody has been sentenced to get the kind of lung scarring or heart scarring that you get from COVID-19. Nobody has been sentenced to endure the side effects that linger for months from COVID-19 and nobodies been sentenced to die from COVID-19.”
There are 12,000 Oregon inmates. The OHA says it’s vaccinated more than that every day. More than 3,000 inmates have tested positive for the virus and of those, 42 people in custody have died. It’s unclear exactly when people in custody will begin to receive their vaccine.
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