An Ethical Decision to Promote Equal Health Care for the Incarcerated: A Vaccine to Ensure Safety and Health Among the Vulnerable

On December 31st, 2019, the government in Wuhan, China documented that health workers were treating dozens of cases of pneumonia from an unknown cause. Days later, virologists identified a new virus that had already infected thousands of people in Asia. Almost a year later, the F.D.A approved a coronavirus vaccine by Pfizer. This cleared the way for millions of highly vulnerable people to begin to receive the vaccine within days. However, with the rollout of vaccination plans come ethical dilemmas of who should be vaccinated first. Individuals at higher risk of exposure should receive priority, yet, despite the substandard healthcare in prisons, inmates being disproportionately affected, and prison walls are porous, inmates have been excluded from covid vaccine plans. Just as Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said, “it’s immoral to promote any plan that isn’t laser-focused on mitigating the risk of infection and the risk of bad public health outcomes.” In this presentation, I will talk about the push to vaccinate the incarcerated population, what contributes to this issue, why we should care about this ongoing issue, and what we can do to address the issue