This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Tracy.
When the pandemic started to spread in the prison systems, it turned my sentence and those like me with life sentences to a death row sentence. And the way this prison responded to the spread throughout the institution made it my reality. If it wasn’t for this experimental drug that the care provider here offered me that wasn’t FDA approved called bamlanivimab I would had fell victim to COVID-19.
Due to being overweight, hypertension, and with one good lung.
Due to becoming a product of the environment it left me this way from being shot through the lung and I was stabbed in the same one. So when I got COVID, it hit me harder than it did others.
I was so sick, I had to make a decision. Do I take this unapproved medication with all these side effects and have a chance to live? Or just sit here damn near dead? I said “fuck it give me the shot.”
I felt as if my back was against the wall. I didn’t have much of a choice. It feels like they wanted inmates to get the virus when you think about how they mixed buildings together. Guys that were in a building with no positive inmates, put in a building that was hot with positive inmates.
