Inmate’s Distrust of Prison Health Care Fuels Distrust of Covid Vaccines

March 26, 2021

(Kaiser Health News) – Inmates pointed to numerous covid deaths they considered preventable, staffing shortages and guards who don’t wear masks. While corrections officials defended their response to covid, Flanders said he’s apprehensive about how the department handles “most everything here recently,” which colors how he thinks about the vaccines. Reluctance to get a covid vaccine is not unique to Missouri inmates. At a county jail in Massachusetts, nearly 60% of more than 400 people incarcerated said in January they would not agree to be vaccinated. At a federal prison in Connecticut, 212 of the 550 inmates offered the vaccines by early March declined the shots, including some who were medically vulnerable, The Associated Press reported.