{"id":1154,"date":"2021-02-20T10:02:41","date_gmt":"2021-02-20T15:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/?p=1154"},"modified":"2021-02-20T10:02:41","modified_gmt":"2021-02-20T15:02:41","slug":"are-people-living-in-congregate-settings-like-prisons-being-prioritized-for-vaccination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/?p=1154","title":{"rendered":"Are people living in congregate settings, like prisons, being prioritized for vaccination?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Question:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0I just read this article about LA\u00a0and\u00a0the issue of social distancing in a crowded household<\/a>. It made me think of whether any of the vaccine efforts should or have prioritized those in living situations that are hard to social distance, such as these,\u00a0and\u00a0nursing homes,\u00a0prisons, etc. I have mostly seen age (b\/c of severity)\u00a0and\u00a0health care works\/teachers (understandably), but from a public health perspective, should we also be prioritizing places that are harder to social distance?\u00a0and\/or have other vaccine\u00a0roll\u00a0out plans (even in other\u00a0countries) prioritized it in this way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Answer:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0Prioritization of\u00a0scarce, lifesaving resources is full of ethical dilemmas.\u00a0 We know that those individuals living and working in congregate settings are at increased risk of contracting COVID– we’ve seen it in\u00a0nursing homes<\/a>,\u00a0prisons<\/a>, meatpacking plants<\/a>, crowded households<\/a>, and more. Some of these individuals– those living in nursing homes and those essential workers like meatpackers–\u00a0have been consistently prioritized<\/a>\u00a0by key groups like the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP).\u00a0 However, because vaccine prioritization\u00a0policy is state-led, there are numerous, varying policies being enacted across the country.\u00a0 A recent NY Times <\/em>article, Where Do Vaccine Doses Go, and Who Gets Them? The Algorithms Decide<\/a>, offers a helpful summary of some of the complexity.\u00a0 For example, Tennessee has developed vaccine prioritization algorithms using variables like poverty and crowded housing to identify neighborhoods that would receive extra doses to facilitate faster vaccination.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to incarcerated individuals, the\u00a0variation in vaccination policy by state is striking.\u00a0 The Prison Policy Initiative<\/a> offers a thorough overview of the issue– “COVID-19 case rate is four times higher in state and federal prisons than in the general population \u2014 and twice as deadly. And despite the danger of close quarters and high rates of preexisting health conditions among incarcerated people, prisons and jails have widely failed to reduce their populations enough to prevent the spread of the virus… The federal Bureau of Prisons announced in November that it plans to reserve its early allotments of the vaccinations for staff, not incarcerated people…”\u00a0 The Initiative also keeps an updated chart of incarcerated population vaccination policy by state (Table 1)<\/strong>.\u00a0 As you can see from the table, there are 9 states who include incarcerated people in Phase 1 vaccination plans and there are 9 states who do not include incarcerated people in any Phase.\u00a0 The American Medical Association recommends<\/a> compassionate release policies among other measures to ethically care<\/a> for those living in jails and prisons,\u00a0particularly\u00a0in the face of the pandemic.\u00a0 And CDC recommends<\/a> that incarcerated people and corrections staff receive vaccination at the same time because of their shared risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Table 1. State-level vaccination prioritization\u00a0for incarcerated people and corrections staff (<\/strong>from Prison Policy Initiative<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question:\u00a0I just read this article about LA\u00a0and\u00a0the issue of social distancing in a crowded household. It made me think of whether any of the vaccine efforts should or have prioritized those in living situations that are hard to social distance, such as these,\u00a0and\u00a0nursing homes,\u00a0prisons, etc. I have mostly seen age (b\/c of severity)\u00a0and\u00a0health care works\/teachers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50,60,47,64],"tags":[176,54],"class_list":["post-1154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guidelines","category-risk","category-states","category-vaccines","tag-prison","tag-tennessee","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/covidqanda.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/image-13.png?fit=1677%2C1139&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1156,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions\/1156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}