Texas Jail Waited Months to Offer Inmates COVID Vaccinations

The jail administration in Williamson County, Texas, began offering COVID-19 vaccinations to inmates about seven months after they were available for people over 65 and those with underlying medical conditions.

Assistant Chief Deputy Kathleen Pokluda told local NBC affiliate KXAN-TV that the vaccines were offered for the first time on July 26. Pokluda leads the corrections division for the Williamson County Sheriff's Office.

The jail administration's delay came because it wanted to provide only the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to Pokluda. She added that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was harder to attain than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

"We had it out of the jail from February until we saw this uptick. We had no COVID, so it wasn't an issue," Pokluda told KXAN. "We had talked about it, but we had decided we wanted the J&J."

Ken Evans, chief deputy of the Williamson County Sheriff's Office, told Newsweek that the delay came as the jail staff was trying to understand COVID at the time, "by using the ever-changing and often conflicting information provided by the CDC, local health authority, Texas jail standards and peer facilities."

"All peer feedback we received at the time was that most, if not all, facilities were seeking to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it only required one shot," Evans said. The coordination of two shots for inmates creates additional challenges because of the unknown variable associated with inmate time in our facility. While COVID did impact our average jail stay, under normal circumstances the average length of stay is generally around 22 to 25 days."

Evans noted that of the 81 inmates that signed up for a vaccine in jail, only 62 got it, which he said was less than 10 percent of the total population that chose to receive it.

He added that another round of vaccinations is set for August 31 and that only 42 inmates have signed up to receive it. The Moderna vaccine is being used.

Thirty-three inmates tested positive in August 2020, compared with 16 cases this month, Evans said. "From July 12 to the present day 22 officers have tested positive for COVID," he added.

Over 9,000 inmates have come into the Williamson County jail since March 2020, with many released before the COVID-19 vaccines were available in the facility, KXAN reported.

County jails in Central Texas use different COVID-related measures with new inmates, the TV station said. Individuals in Williamson County jail are required to quarantine if they show COVID symptoms and refuse to be tested.

"Now when the [COVID] outbreak happened, we weren't doing temperatures, but now we are back to doing temperatures every day. We do it twice a day," Pokluda told KXAN. "We have caught people that way, because that may be all that they have."

On June 14, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards released its latest report tracking COVID-19 cases at county jails statewide over the course of the pandemic. The commission said that 88 inmates tested positive and 24 died from the disease.

The commission also reported that 3,836 inmates in all county jails who didn't have COVID were being quarantined.

Asked why the Texas Commission on Jail Standards stopped requiring data for July and August, Kaitlin Lopez Cano, a program specialist at the commission, told Newsweek, "We stopped requiring county jails to report COVID data. We stopped reporting the data because staff was repurposed for other duties within the agency."

Melinda Long, a mother of a Williamson County jail inmate, told KXAN that her son received a COVID-19 vaccine two weeks before he was released from jail. Long's son has been in jail since November 2020.

"They [inmates] don't deserve to die," Long said. "That has been the thing I have prayed would not happen. I know that I could not have handled it. I know his boys could not have handled it. At least they have that little bit of hope that their father can get better."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who recently tested positive for the virus, issued a ban on school mask mandates in July, but the Texas Supreme Court ruled against him this week.