The High-Risk Group Left Out of New York’s Vaccine Rollout - The New York Times

Virus cases are surging among incarcerated people at prisons and jails.

But state officials have not announced when they will be vaccinated.

When New York announced new vaccine eligibility guidelines two weeks ago covering millions of additional state residents, one particularly hard-hit group remained unmentioned: the nearly 50,000 people incarcerated in the state’s prisons and jails.

Now, with state supplies dwindling and no clear plan for vaccinating incarcerated people, the virus that tore through the state’s correctional facilities in the spring is roaring back behind bars.

But how and when to vaccinate incarcerated people as millions around the state wait has raised legal, logistical and ethical questions that the state has so far struggled to answer.

New Jersey began vaccinating people in prisons in December.

Others plan to vaccinate prison and jail workers before incarcerated people, breaking with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends vaccinating everyone at correctional facilities simultaneously.

In New York, state senators have questioned whether prioritizing people in prisons makes sense.

In Colorado, a draft plan to offer the vaccine inside prisons was met with fierce backlash for, as one district attorney wrote in The Denver Post, prioritizing “the health of incarcerated murderers” ahead of “law-abiding Coloradans 65 and older.”.

New York officials said the state was preparing a plan.

But public health experts broadly agree that incarcerated people are at particularly high risk for contracting and spreading the virus, as at least 8,800 people living or working in New York’s prison system have tested positive since the start of the pandemic.

And because guards, lawyers, workers and people entering and leaving custody move between the facilities and the community at large, the public health implications of outbreaks behind bars extend far beyond the prison walls.Officials said last fall that an outbreak at Greene Correctional Facility near Albany was linked to cases at an assisted-living facility and an elementary school.

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first.

So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on.

But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms.

In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders.

They also lack the political power and societal favor of other vulnerable groups — a dynamic that has pinned state officials between the ethical responsibility for the health of people in state custody and potential public backlash.

Individuals who live in “congregate settings” were designated to receive doses after frontline health care workers but before people under 65 with underlying health conditions.

Several members of the Republican conference in the State Senate and Assembly said that in a Jan.

Howard Zucker, said that incarcerated people would be allowed to receive the vaccine in Phase 2.

Gallivan, a Republican from the Buffalo area on the Senate’s health committee, said he was concerned about vaccinating incarcerated people in the earliest phases when many essential workers and residents of long-term care facilities have not been inoculated.

Cuomo’s office and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said only that a plan for incarcerated people was still being developed.

Despite the absence of a statewide plan, New York City officials received permission to start vaccinating the highest-risk people held at Rikers Island and other facilities on Jan.

Two days later, medical staff began distributing doses to the roughly 500 eligible people incarcerated there.

Peter Kehoe, the executive director of the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, said that out of concern he had reached out to the state last month for details on vaccinations in county jails, which sheriffs oversee.