This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
UCI: Anything. I know you did mention about the vaccination situation. Did you personally get vaccinated?
Caller: I did, yeah.
UCI: What was that like? How was that process?
Caller: It was chaotic. Some people got the Moderna, some people got the Johnson & Johnson. The majority of us got the Moderna. It was a two-step process.
We went in the first time, took the shot, they gave us the card. We came back, I think, like, a couple of weeks later, took the second shot. You know, I caught COVID and I didn’t really have any symptoms. I had a headache.
My stomach was kind of queasy. I worked out every single day even when I was sick with COVID. So, it didn’t affect me as much as it did other people. I saw other people that went to the hospital. Someone that I knew personally in my building died.
When I took the first shot I had no symptoms. I was, okay, this isn’t so bad. When I went and took my second shot, my whole arm got really sore and I had a very low energy level for about a 24-hour period, which for me, I knew something was wrong because I usually am bouncing off the walls. So, I knew right away that the second shot kind of put me down.
But, they pretty much herded us over in big droves and we just, it was like an assembly line. You know, 20 people go in. They had about 20 stations in the gym.
Twenty people would go in, get your shot, boom, they would send you outside and you sat out on the bleachers. You sat there for about 15 minutes and they monitored you to make sure that you didn’t have a bad reaction. And then, after the 15 minutes they sent you back to the building.
UCI: You did mention though your second shot you did get some side effects?
Caller: I did.
UCI: Did your facility help you out at all with that?
Caller: No. The medical here, to be honest with you, when the COVID first hit here they were coming in every single morning and they were checking everybody’s temperatures, everybody’s breathing, everybody’s heart rate. They pretty much, they were doing our vitals every single morning.
But, outside of that, medical has been pretty much nonexistent. You know, other than the fact that, you know, once a lot of people started catching it they tested everybody in the building, and once they realized that almost everybody in the building has it they were just coming in and taking our vitals.
But, I mean, it’s hard to get an Ibuprofen if you have a headache here. It’s not, medical here is not like medical on the streets where you can go see your doctor and get a prescription. You know, you can go to the doctors here and tell them you have a headache and you have to convince four people, you know, that you really have a headache just to get a bottle of Ibuprofen.
UCI: That sounds awful.
Caller: Yeah, it’s not the best, you know, medical. Very unorganized. A lot of times, you know, it’s a long wait.
People wait so long to get medical attention. You know, I’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff, you know, with that. But, I mean, you literally have to be bleeding in order to get any type of medical attention here.
