We’re being told that a lot of Missouri’s incarcerated population has refused the COVID vaccine or is planning to. They don’t trust the vaccine, they don’t trust the DOC, and they don’t trust Corizon. Can you blame them? After their experiences with the legal system, their experiences with DOC staff and administration, and the handling of COVID by MoDOC. One incarcerated man from ERDCC in Bonne Terre sent us the following email regarding the COVID vaccine.
“Here’s how they give some of us what they tell us, is a “vaccine” shot. The nurse doesn’t wear a mask, or gloves. If you ask the nurse to put on a mask, or put on some gloves, you threatened with being put in the hole. We don’t get to see the bottle that says “moderna” on it. All the syringes are already filled up with whatever they give us and they sit out for hours on a cart—so they aren’t stored and administered at whatever the correct temperature is. The nurse pushes the cart full of filled syringes all over the prison. The nurse comes in contact with sorts of staff and inmates. So if the nurse has COVID-19 and is asymptomatic, or comes into contact with someone who has the virus, she has just spread the virus all over the prison. Then she will take her personal super spreader event home and pass the virus to people in the community. And the nurse does not watch anyone for 15 minutes to see if an adverse reaction happens. Basically, everything you could think of that is wrong, is what they do. We are POWERLESS to protect ourselves in here. We are human beings and they are killing us in here. Who knew that ERDCC had the special freezers to store the vaccine at it’s correct temperature????? If the prison had the special freezers, why didn’t the state just borrow theirs when the state was trying to figure out how to properly store the vaccine? Or maybe ERDCC and the other prisons don’t have the special freezers needed to store the vaccine.”
