The incarcerated people at Federal Medical Center Devens should have been some of the first to receive the Covid vaccines, back when they first came out in December 2020. At the time, the country was prioritizing high-risk people in high-risk settings, like older Americans in nursing homes.
So Devens seemed a better candidate than most prisons for an early vaccine rollout: It’s one of just seven facilities in the country equipped to handle federal prisoners with complex medical conditions like end-stage renal disease — people who were also especially vulnerable to dying from the coronavirus.
But Devens wasn’t the first, or even the second, federal prison to start vaccinating its residents. It was tied for last.
FMC Devens did not vaccinate a single resident for Covid-19 until Feb. 11, 2021 — almost two months after its counterparts across the federal Bureau of Prisons got started. The Massachusetts-based facility did get shots in arms after the 11th, administering 362 doses in just a week. But by then, the six other federal medical centers had together already administered 2,340 doses.
Eight men housed at Devens died of Covid-19-related complications during the wait. And while it’s impossible to say definitively whether they would have lived if Devens began vaccinating more quickly, the facility’s slow pace of vaccination — which has not been reported before now — is the clearest example of the substandard mitigation measures taken by many federal prisons throughout the pandemic, including high-risk facilities meant to take care of the sickest incarcerated people. STAT analyzed nearly 1,500 pages of data, obtained through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide the most detailed look to date at the broader federal prison system’s Covid-19 response. They include the number of Covid-19 tests and vaccines administered daily at each federal prison from the start of the pandemic to mid-2022.