Feds: Fewer than half of prison inmates vaccinated
DANBURY — Roughly 43 percent of inmates and 60 percent of staff at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury have been vaccinated for COVID-19 so far, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
During a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. asked the bureau’s director, Michael Carvajal, a number of questions about vaccinations at Danbury’s low-security prison.
Carvajal said that 323 inmates and 162 FCI Danbury staff had been fully vaccinated, and he anticipates all inmates will have had the opportunity
to get vaccinated by mid-May. According to FCI Danbury’s website, there are approximately 763 inmates at the prison.
Although efforts have been made to inform prison staff and inmates about vaccine effectiveness and safety, Carvajal said the acceptance rate among staff in the Bureau of Prisons’s 122 facilities is around 51 percent.
“We educate the staff and the inmates. We talk about it; we lead by example,” he said. “We’re doing everything that we can within our limits (but) we have to respect people’s rights … to either take it or not.”
According to a report filed on behalf of FCI Danbury’s warden this week, about 40 percent of inmates have declined getting vaccinated.
Blumenthal asked if the bureau would be receptive to suggestions for ways to improve vaccine acceptance, and Carvajal said yes.
“We’re always open to improving our operations — and if you have a good idea that would work for us, we’re certainly open to listen to it,” he said. “I’m looking forward to hopefully the vaccine playing a role in normalizing our operations.”
COVID-19 has been an ongoing problem at the prison since the start of the pandemic last year.
Last April, a group of FCI Danbury inmates filed a lawsuit against the prison, claiming that the facility had failed to protect inmates from the coronavirus.
The inmates accused the prison’s warden and staff of “deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of serious harm to inmates” by “making only limited use of their home confinement authority, as well as other tools at their disposal to protect inmates during the outbreak.”
A month after the lawsuit was filed, a judge ordered the prison to establish a “more accelerated and more clearly focused” process for evaluating medically vulnerable inmates for home confinement and other forms of release.
A settlement agreement — outlining processes for the prison to take in identifying medically vulnerable inmates and determining their suitability for home confinement in a timely manner — was reached in July. The prison still has to meet stipulations of the agreement, and the court is tasked with ensuring the Bureau of Prisons complies with the terms.
With the rollout of vaccines this year, FCI Danbury relies on the federal government — not the state — for distribution.
Carvajal said vaccines are offered at the prison “as they come in,” but the bureau has no control over their arrival. That, he said, is determined by the federal government.
As a federal agency, the Bureau of Prisons receives
COVID-19 vaccines through the federal government’s
COVID-19 Vaccine/Therapeutics Operation.
FCI Danbury has received vaccines in “waves of 200 or 300 doses at a time,” and another wave is expected to arrive early next week, according to status reports filed in the lawsuit case this week.
Roughly 250 inmates at FCI Danbury have yet to be offered a COVID-19 vaccine, according to one of the reports, but prison officials believe the next wave of doses “may be sufficient to offer the vaccine to all inmates” in the prison.