Nearly 80% of Department of Corrections staff members in Vermont’s prisons have received the Covid-19 vaccine, according to Rachel Feldman, a department spokesperson.
But the vaccination rate for staffers at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport — site of the largest outbreak in a state prison since the pandemic began — is far lower than the overall prison system.
At Northern State, 63 of 112 corrections staff members have been vaccinated, about 56%. Newport is the state’s largest prison, with about 340 inmates. As of Monday, 164 of them had tested positive for the virus.
Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio says he’d like to see a vaccination rate of 100%. And, he said, if a corrections officer can’t verify having received a shot, or has refused to get one, that person should not be permitted to work inside a prison.
“They do have a right to do what they want to do,” Valerio said. “Nevertheless, I think that in certain professions it should be mandatory. You put yourself at risk, you put the people you are working with at risk, you put the inmates at risk.”
Valerio said it’s particularly important that corrections staff be vaccinated since state officials have refused to provide universal vaccination of inmates.
Currently, the state vaccinates incarcerated individuals only if they fall within the statewide eligible age bands or qualify because of a medical condition.
The corrections department, at the urging of the staff union, last week vaccinated employees who work in facilities with inmates.
In total, 467 of the 591 corrections staff members working inside Vermont prisons have been vaccinated, or 79%, Feldman said. The vaccine offered at the clinics was the one-shot version manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.
No one is tracking the remaining 21% to determine why they did not take the vaccine at one of the prison clinics, or to ask them if they got the vaccine at an outside location. Feldman cited medical privacy.
“We track those who are vaccinated at the facility clinics,” she said. “I’ve not heard of any refusals, but we’re also not probing into people’s personal medical choices and lives.”
Some staff had scheduling conflicts and couldn’t make it to the prison clinics, so they chose to get the shots at pharmacies instead, Feldman said.
Staff members who were not vaccinated at one of the prison clinics are still permitted to work inside a facility and don personal protective equipment as they have in the past.
“We are still requiring all of the different safety and mitigation efforts that have been put in place,” Feldman said. “It doesn’t change anything about our response to the virus. It’s another tool in our toolkit to make sure (Covid-19) doesn’t enter our facilities.”
The Vermont State Police do not track vaccinations among officers and other staff members, “as that is inherently private medical information,” said Adam Silverman, a state police spokesperson.
State police members are not required to get vaccinated, Silverman wrote in an email.
Feldman said the corrections department did not entertain making vaccination mandatory for staff members.
“We prefer to give people the authority to make their own medical decisions,” she said. “And again, we’re heartened by the response rate we’ve seen.”
Feldman said she wasn’t sure why the staff vaccination percentage at the Newport prison was lower than the overall rate for the corrections department. She speculated that, due to contact tracing and the number of workers out on quarantine, more staff at the Newport prison may have found it easier to wait or get the shot elsewhere, rather than at the prison clinic March 9.
Valerio, the defender general, said he understands collective bargaining issues may be a factor in requiring a corrections officer to receive the vaccine, but “there are provisions in contracts to do things on an emergency basis. I think they should be vaccinated if they want to work in a prison. It’s that simple.”
Valerio said it’s not clear whether an employee can be required to receive a vaccination.
“To me, it’s just an unresolved area of the law because we’ve never been here before,” he said.
Another option, he said would be requiring corrections staff members to verify vaccinations before working in prisons.
“You can’t cut their pay,” he said, “but reassign them to somewhere where they don’t pose a threat to the inmates or the people inside.”
Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, said he encourages anyone who has a chance to be vaccinated to do it. However, he said, he understands if someone chooses not to for religious or medical reasons.
“We believe that vaccinations should be voluntary,” Howard said. “Mandatory vaccinations would be the subject of bargaining; the administration would have to come bargain with us about it.”
As for reassigning unvaccinated corrections staff, Howard said that would only worsen an already problematic staffing shortage in the prisons.
“It makes it virtually impossible for anything like that to work,” he said. “We have people who are already working 16-hour shifts and sleeping in their cars because they don’t have time to go home.”
