Anthony Cheek was the first incarcerated person to die of Covid-19, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Since his death a year ago nearly 2,500 incarcerated people have perished from the disease. 

Prisons are some of the country’s most concentrated COVID-19 hotspots, and since the beginning of the pandemic almost 400,000 incarcerated people have been infected — that’s an astonishing 16% of the entire U.S. prison population. Clearly, America's prison systems are not equipped to keep incarcerated people safe from coronavirus.  

Help stop the rampant infections and avoidable deaths in our prisons. Demand Congress ensure incarcerated people  get vaccines as soon as possible. Sign the petition.

It’s important to remember that this isn’t just something happening at the federal level as states like California and Florida have the highest death rates of incarcerated people due to COVID, and local and state incarceration facilities continue to struggle as a result of the pandemic.

As the mission to immunize all adults by summer kicks into high gear, we must not forget that there are people in prison who are being overlooked for the vaccine. Even more concerning is the fact that many of these incarcerated people are at a high risk of dying from COVID-19 given their age or medical conditions, and the fact that many incarcerated people are often packed in close quarters with inadequate standards of care. What’s more - this virus doesn’t respect prison walls; an outbreak in a prison puts the surrounding community at risk too.

We need our political leaders to move swiftly and ensure incarcerated people are vaccinated. The pandemic has demonstrated the inequities of our system and the deadly cost of inaction with a crisis of this scale, but we can still make our voices heard for the over 2 million people behind bars.

Please sign our petition and demand Congress vaccinate our prison population with as much urgency as the rest of us.