There just isn't enough vaccine to go around when it comes to Texas prisons.
In an email, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman write that all 13,500 doses received by the system are meant for healthcare professionals. If more come in, they'll go to correctional officers.
And Austin re-entry advocate Laurie Pherigo says inmates can't control how many people they're around or how close they get to each other. "You don't have access to a clean mask every day. You don't have access to many of the tools we use out here in the free world to keep ourselves from being infected."
She says when inmates become infected, they are less likely to get prompt medical care and are not going to have access to treatments like monoclonal antibody treatment.
She says prisons are superspreaders for any type of infection, but especially for Covid-19 and especially with these new variants that are in Texas and many other states.
She says given all that, "you have a lot of people dying. Unfortunately what that means is they are effectively getting death sentences that were not given to them by the judge or the jury,"
According to the TDCJ website, there have been 365,701 inmate and 145,089 employee tests conducted for COVID-19. Of those tested, 32,766 inmates and 10,437 staff have tested positive for COVID-19 in both symptomatic and asymptomatic testing. There have been 28,806 inmates and 9,173 employees who have recovered. There have been 187 inmate deaths connected to COVID 19 with an additional 53 under investigation. There have been 37 employee line of duty deaths from COVID-19.