Dade vaccinates more detainees but hundreds still at risk
The Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department partnered with a county commissioner to vaccinate about 100 inmates on Thursday, but the supply of the one-shot vaccine is a major roadblock.
Donning a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit, a MiamiDade jail detainee became one of the first in the state to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. TV camera operators, reporters and county dignitaries surrounded him just past the facility’s fortified entrance on Thursday morning.
After the nurse re
moved the needle from his heavily tattooed arm, the man, who was not identified, jumped up from his plastic seat and shouted, “Thank you!”
His gratitude was warranted. Florida’s most populous county, MiamiDade, is one of a handful in the state where local officials have at least started to vaccinate their jail detainees, even though thousands of incarcerated people qualify for the vaccines under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ eligibility criteria, live in crowded conditions and have no way to get a shot on their own.
Just 61 of the approximately 4,000 detainees in Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department custody had been vaccinated before Thursday morning, when District 9 Commissioner Kionne McGhee held a news conference to announce he had forged a partnership with a health clinic to vaccinate jail detainees. That brought the total vaccinated to
161.
The doses were from Johnson & Johnson, meaning there is no follow-up shot — a good thing since a detainee could be freed from jail or en route to a Florida prison by the time the 21 days had rolled around for the second shot that is needed for other COVID-19 vaccines.
A spokesperson for the county corrections department said in addition to the 161 who have now been vaccinated, there are 447 detainees over the age of 50 who have an underlying medical condition that could put them at risk for severe COVID — qualifying them for a vaccine. An additional 727 would be eligible next week, when the minimum age drops to 40.
McGhee referred to those in the jail as the county’s “detained residents.”
“They too deserve an opportunity to be a part of the vaccination rollout,” McGhee said in front of the cameras. “This is not something we are doing so we can simply do it and count numbers. This is a population that has been lost, left out, but more than anything, completely pushed away from our norms.”
McGhee recruited Community Health of
South Florida — a federally qualified health center, which has been inoculating vulnerable, low-income and homeless people — to provide and administer the shots.
There had been no plan in place to vaccinate Miami-Dade jail detainees, who are technically under the care of Jackson Health System, the county’s public-hospital network. While Jackson has been vaccinating large swaths of the public, it has been using two-dose vaccines that it says would be logistically challenging to administer to the rotating population inside county jails.
Over the course of the pandemic, 1,864 detainees and 846 staff members have tested positive at Miami-Dade jails, according to Jackson. Three who were held in the jail have died from COVID, Jackson said, and at least one corrections officer, Jairo Bravo, 48, died during the summer from the disease.
McGhee, the county commissioner, said he had plans to meet with DeSantis next week to discuss the importance of vaccinating jail detainees, who, along with prisoners in state custody, have been left out of the state’s efforts.
In response to questions about vaccinating the incarcerated with risk factors, DeSantis said about a week ago: “‘We are focusing obviously on our law-abiding population first.”
WHO WILL VACCINATE THE REST?
At the Thursday press conference, Miami-Dade Public Defender Carlos
Martinez lauded the corrections director, Daniel Junior, for his response to the pandemic, particularly his isolation and testing policies.
Martinez, whose office overlooks the jail’s entrance, said it was the first news conference that he had attended since the pandemic began a year ago.
“Let’s keep it going,” he said. “By this time, 30 days from now, the challenge is: not 100, let’s do 1,000.”
Junior, who took the lectern later, echoed that sentiment. He credited McGhee for reaching out to the department and offering access to his allocation of vaccines. But with several hundred detainees still eligible and unvaccinated, it was unclear where the rest of the doses would come from.
Jackson, which has vaccinated more than 131,000 people since January, said it is using the Pfizer vaccine exclusively, which requires the 21-day separation between doses.
“Jackson’s Corrections Health Services stands ready to vaccinate inmates as soon as the county or state provides us with supplies of a onedose option, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is more effective in protecting this transient population, does not require ultra-cold storage, and can be administered easily on-site in the jails,” said a hospital spokesperson.
But the one-shot vaccine has been in scarce supply in Florida and throughout the country due to production delays. Miami-Dade County has
not received any supply of Johnson & Johnson, according to the spokesperson for Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
Despite an allegation posted on Twitter from state Rep. Omari Hardy, a West Palm Beach Democrat, that DeSantis had directed health officials to withhold the vaccine from detainees, Levine Cava said the county was under no such order.
A spokesperson for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comments on the allegation.
“We haven’t been operating under any policy to withhold vaccines from people who are in jail,” the Miami-Dade mayor’s office said in a statement.
Instead, county and local officials pinned the issue on logistics — needing a one-dose vaccine that was easier to administer for transient populations — at least as it pertains to those in jail, many of whom are are not yet convicted and rotate in and out of facilities much more frequently than state inmates, who have also been denied access to vaccines.
It’s unclear when the county will receive doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
McGhee said he was “casting a wide net” on where to turn next.
“I’m not quite sure if we’re going to hit the 1,000 [in 30 days] mark,” he said after the news conference. “But we’ve got to have hope, and we have to press our foot on the gas.”