I got my second covid-19 vaccine shot two weeks ago. Moderna.

After the first shot, I felt a little lethargic and slept it off for a day. After the second one, just had a sore arm for a while. The needle was about 18 feet long, I think. When the nurse stuck me, the tip of the needle came out of my armpit. But aside from getting impaled, I didn’t have any problems.

I got covid twice. First time I had it last February, before covid was even officially here. Medical staff told me I had food poisoning.

Food poisoning… In my lungs… I guess in a prison setting they chock up a lot of stuff to food poisoning.

I got covid again this past January. I had to move into what they call a ‘red zone.’ I called it the ‘zombie apocalypse block.’ It wasn’t so bad. The first time I caught covid, I was stuck in my bed for about four days, only got up to puke. The second time, I had a lingering cough for about two weeks. I lost my taste and my smell. Each week all of us in the zombie apocalypse block had to take these swab tests. Those are fun. It’s like having a q-tip scraped against your brain. I lost I portions of my cerebral cortex. Each time I took the swab test, I lost the ability to do simple math for a few days.

I got my sense of smell and taste back. That’s not necessarily a good thing. You know, prison food being what it is and the internal ventilation system constantly recycling stale farts.

Here, the vaccinations began in early February but I had to wait until the third wave of vaccinations here because I had just gotten over covid when the first shots became available. But now, they’ve cycled through. I was one of the last ones here to get my second shot.

I know there’s a lot of controversy over the vaccine because they were fast-tracked. Probably there are reasonable and legitimate concerns about potential long-term effects that are currently unknowable. But my thinking on that goes like this…

A vaccine is a vaccine. There are only so many ways to develop a vaccine. There’s a process. And in the course of modern life, our scientists with big, big brains have developed hundreds of thousands or even millions of vaccines for things like Polio and Small Pox and even the mundane Flu that we normally face. We’ve had these vaccines, some of them, for more than half a century. None of those vaccines have caused widespread sterilization, or contained nanobot computer chips or delivered Satanic identifiers that work like a bar code for the times of revelations. I have no reason to believe that this vaccine is going to be any different in terms of it’s long term health impacts, than any of the other vaccines for other diseases. Vaccinated people have gotten pregnant, nanobot technology is really expensive and impractical, and if Satan were really that ambitious, Trump would have gotten a second term.

There are guys here at the prison, a few, who opted not to get the vaccine. That’s a matter of personal choice, I suppose. I question the wisdom of it.

Some of those guys tell me they believe that this mass vaccination of prisoners is to do biological testing on us. What that testing is, varies according to each prisoner. Some say those in power want to see how the vaccine works or doesn’t work on us, getting data on how many of us fall over dead. So far, that number at this prison appears to be zero, by the way, for any secret scientists keeping score at all.

Others claim this is an extension of a long history of experimenting on Black and brown bodies, going back to the Tuskegee Experiments, when government scientists isolated Black men and infected them with sexually transmitted diseases just to see how those diseases progressed. This included infecting those men with Syphilis, which causes nuerological damage including dementia and even death. The US did this, something akin to what the Nazis had done.

And to be fair, this isn’t just the distant past. I did time with a guy named Dan Starkes at Mansfield, OH, in the 1990’s. He had served a sentence in Michigan where he was paid pretty well by prison standards for allowing pharmaceuticals to be tested on him. Last time I saw him, Dan was gaunt and hollow, riddled with cancer and wondering if years of pharmaceutical tests had been worth it.

No doubt, we are expendable as prisoners and the majority of us are Black or brown and there’s a long history of de-humanizing experiments on people of color. But even acknowledging that, I have to suspect that if those in power wanted to experiment on us, they’d just put stuff in our food or the cleaning chemicals we all use or pump it through the vents.

When someone tells me they really don’t know what’s in the vaccine, I remind them that they can’t identify what they just had for lunch. For all we know, we just had a main course of radio active isotopes, with a side order of Zyklon B. If you’re going to tell me you don’t know what’s in the vaccine, explain to me what’s in that bag of cheese puffs you’re eating.

I’m not saying I trust governments or large pharmaceutical companies, I just think they have easier and more practical ways of killing us that aren’t quite so conspicuous and don’t have the extraordinary danger of exposure and widespread blow-back.

And to the question of why they’re vaccinating prisoners so early in the roll out. Well, I suspect it’s not because they love us so much, it’s because they don’t want this disease bouncing around in this petri dish prison complex and then spilling back out. And they can get large numbers in a short time, which looks good for the politicians. That’s my thinking, anyhow.

Then I look at the main proponents of the anti-vaxer movement. Most of them are conservative, White men floating in the orbit of the Q-Anon conspiracy, believing that a nefarious group of satanic child molesters is carrying out a secret plot to ruin America. When I hear this, I’m convinced that the American public school system is what ruined America, by failing to teach these White conservatives how to think.

What I’m saying is, it appears that most of the anti-vax theories are originating from folks who have a particular agenda. As a matter of intellectual honesty, I have to dismiss their claims as just a lot of “White” noise.

Anyway, it’s two weeks since I got my second vaccine shot, my brain is still functioning as badly as it ever was, no erectile dysfunction (for anyone who wants to know). I haven’t felt the urge to shamble or bite anyone and the blood work from last week shows no significant change in my health status. I feel pretty nanobot free, I don’t regret choosing to get vaccinated.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain in exile from Ohio in Buckingham Correction, in Dillwyn, Virginia. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance.

Sean Swain’s segment on the loss of his father, first broadcast September 13, 2020

Also, formatted as a zine, and the audio can be found here.

One of my earliest memories, I couldn’t have been older than three years old. It was in the kitchen of my parents home in Des Moines, Iowa, and my dad was holding me while my mom was on the phone and I was trying to reach out to grab the ceramic Pillsbury Doughboy cookie jar. I lost my dad on March 24th due to complications after heart surgery. He had been waiting to get scheduled for the surgery since before Thanksgiving, but he wasn’t a priority. He didn’t matter to the people to make life and death decisions.

He should have. He was a really extraordinary guy. I know I’m biased because he was my dad, but even so, he was an exceptional human being. He was kind and generous and gentle and he really loved life. He and my mom were together for something like 55 years. This has really devastated her. My dad wanted to be cremated, so my mom has his ashes in an ornate walnut box that he would have liked, as he loves to do woodwork and make chains after he retired.

I’m an only child, so my mom’s alone now and it’s hard on her—because she’s really alone. She’s in her 70s and can’t risk getting Covid 19. She’s constantly injuring herself, doing yard work and other nonsense she has no business doing. She needs to be home. I’ve been meaning to share this for some time to help maybe work through this loss, but it’s hard to reduce the words. There’s the pain of missing him. But there is more.

I think, of all that he went through and the sacrifices that he made for my mom and for me. He worked at Ford for 30 years. He hated it. Factory work. Another of my earliest memories, my mom and I were in the car dropping my dad off at the Ford plant. He had on a denim jacket, one of those old black metal lunchboxes, the kind that was rounded at the top, the whole performance. He was in his 20s, that shaggy hair and beard.

Beyond this loss and grief, I feel a sense of injustice for him. The day he died, the world kept spinning. There was no pause, no moment of reflection, traffic kept moving on the highways, everyone kept shopping. The stock market closed slightly up for the day. Apart from my mom and me and a handful of close friends family. It was as if he had never existed, as if he never happened.

Somewhere at the Ford plant on Romeo Plank Road in Michigan, an assembly line worker stood right where my dad spent decades and that worker perform the same job my dad used to do. He or she is probably never even heard of Paul Swain.

So beyond the grief, it was hard for me to wrestle with the sense that the world moves on like that. In fact, it doesn’t even blink, not just for my dad, but for all of us. It makes it feel sometimes like all the struggle and the sorrow, the misery and even the joy that none of it counts. It’s there a God like ashes and a strong breeze. And then so we.

I share this house because it feels like the world over we’re in an era of loss. With covid-19 raging and the fascist march with knees on our necks, with knees on our necks of guns pressing our backs. It feels like everything is for nothing. It feels like doom and gloom. So maybe that is the point. Maybe these cumulative losses, this intolerable meaninglessness, this sense of the hopeless, it all confronts us and it confronts all of us, and it awaits our collective response.

For me personally, I never met George Floyd. I didn’t know him, but I knew Paul Swain. I remember when he was young and that denim jacket, facing the daily small injustices, the humiliations and the reductions. To the thousands of spectacular and terrible atrocities we witnessed, also accompanied by hundreds of millions of more mundane ones that we all experience.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that as I navigate the loss of my dad, it’s important for me to think about how this collective struggle against the current dystopia is to stop the brutality like we saw on the streets and the Minneapolis for nine minutes. But it’s also to stop the slow roasted brutality to which we are all victims.

I don’t just want to end police or prisons. I want to end factories and sweatshops and wage slavery and nation states and chemical warfare and all the components of this immiserating shit society in which we live and shop and work and die.

I want to struggle and win because all of our lives and all of our deaths should matter. Until we have that kind of a world, we owe it to those we love, and to those we’ve lost, to fight for them and for ourselves.

This is Paul Swain’s son. If you’re listening, you are the resistance.

ODRC Fears Swain’s Reason

Sean Swain is being silenced by the Ohio Department of Retribution and Corruption again. In a classic move of an abusive, one-sided relationship, ODRC Director Annette Chambers-Smith (former General Manager of Payment Services at dastardly prison profiteer JPay Inc) and her underlings are overseeing the shut-out of JPay (the monopoly communication and digital media choice of many state prison systems) email and GTL phone services for Sean Swain with no explanation. Remember, while Sean is a prisoner IN Virginia, he is a prisoner OF Ohio (in exile).

This comes shortly after Detroit ABC published Sean’s An Open Letter to Annette Chambers-Smith from Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain, copies of which were intercepted by mailroom goons alongside portions of Sean’s forthcoming LBC book, ‘Ohio’ (an expansion of his formerly published zine). Here we reproduce the contents of Sean’s open letter and invite readers and supporters to reach out to the ODRC and the VADOC and enquire as to Sean’s communication.

Trigger / Content Warning, the below text contains descriptions of sexual assault by ODRC employees that Sean experienced while in Ohio prison.:

AN OPEN LETTER TO “EXPLOITATION ANNIE,” ANNETTE CHAMBERS SMITH, DIRECTOR OF THE OPPRESSIVE DIMWITS OF RETRIBUTION AND CORRUPTION… ON TORTURE, RAPE, FAILED ASSASSINATION, ILLEGAL RENDITION, HER LEGACY AS AN INCOMPETENT AND INSENSITIVE FUCKWEASEL… AND THE 826 SONGS ON JPAY SHE STOLE FROM ME…

Dear Exploitation Annie:

You might not remember me. You illegally exiled me to Virginia more than a year and a half ago, so I’ll have to jog your memory.

In 2012, I wrote a public criticism of JPay, the company you ran before getting appointed to the ODRC. When I criticized your old company, your predecessor equated journalism with terrorism, had me tortured, and declared me a gang leader based upon my “ideology.”

During that year of torture, ODRC attorney Trevor Matthew Clark interrogated me and, during that interrogation, he subjected me to sexual assault, cupping my testicles in his hand and demanding sex acts that I did not perform.

Clark no longer works at the ODRC. He’s now at Wexner Medical Center for Ohio State University. They must need a lawyer experienced in grabbing balls.

After Clark grabbed my balls and the torture ended, Clark enlisted a number of officials as accomplices to torment me, including Paul Shoemaker, Roger Wilson, Brian Wenstrup and others– subjecting me to contrived disciplinary actions, baseless communications restrictions, and a whole host of really petty and childish retaliations.

The lesson is pretty clear: when a coked-up prison system lawyer grabs your balls, just let him grab your balls.

All of the reprehensible and mind-numbing torments concocted by Clark’s accomplices were recounted at seanswain.org. Then, free world people found it so shocking, they posted prison officials’ home addresses at blastblog.noblogs.org.

That’s the consequences when you conspire to carry out the agenda of a creepy ball-grabber.

They are all ball-grabbers-by-proxy.

So, by the time you came along, these clowns were continuing to ramp up the repression and it escalated until something got torched at your predecessor’s home. Gary Mohr resigned, took up a consulting job in North Carolina, fucking up their prisons like he fucked up Ohio’s.

On his way out, he hatched a plot to have me killed at Lucasville. That got exposed when prisoners there blew the whistle.

And then you came along, perfectly unqualified, after running a predatory, profiteering company that exploits prisoners. One of your first acts in office was to illegally subject the critic of your company to rendition, exiling me to the Virginia prison system.

Best thing you fuckweasels ever did to me. The food is fantastic. The weather is wonderful. The prisons are run by responsible adults, unlike Ohio.

Then COVID-19 hit and you responded to it with historic mismanagement, killing off more prisoners through ineptitude and apathy than any other prisons director. Hundreds of preventable deaths.

You really suck at this. I got exiled just in time.

I hear you got COVID-19. Unfortunate for all those prisoners that you didn’t get it sooner. Also unfortunate for them…you survived.

So, at any rate, I’ve been here in Virginia more than a year and I still don’t have my music or email from JPay. I bought it in good faith and you deprived me of access by renditioning me. JPay says they can’t transfer it from my Ohio account to Virginia.

Since you ran JPay, and because your illegal exile of me caused this fiasco, I was thinking you could get my music and emails to me.

If not, I’ll accept a personal check for the amount of my loss. I’m sure you’ve got more loot than you know what to do with, given your time with JPay… swindling prisoners…

Thanks again for exiling me to Virginia before the apocalypse hit.

Hugs,

Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain

This audio can be heard in the April 5th edition of The Final Straw Radio or in Sean’s archive collection (or just right here):

Sucks to be me.
Back in early February, I got the flu. I hugged the toilet for two days.
Terrible. In the midst of it, a staffer witnessed me puking and insisted I go to medical.
At medical, I was seen by Nurse Amy Starkey who told me I didn’t have a fever despite the sweat pouring off of me… in February. She listened to my lungs and didn’t hear the sludge that was broiling in there. She suggested I had food poisoning– which would only make sense if all eleven hundred of us were puking… since we all eat the same shit.
Medical did nothing for me. Nothing. I shambled back to my cell, an hour older and a lot more annoyed.
So, early March, when I still had the gurgling sludge in my lungs, I signed up for sick call. I wanted to get that cleared up before the zombie apocalypse arrived at the prison gates, since people with
preexisting conditions sputter out at a far greater rate than those who don’t have them.
I got called back to the medical clinic. Nurse Amy Starkey again. I told her I had pneumonia in 2012 and it felt like this lung sludge only more intense. She listened to my lungs and documented the congestion, then got up and left. A few minutes later, she returned. “The Nurse Practitioner says its normal to have that kind of congestion up to eight weeks after you get over the flu.”
I don’t know if the nurse practitioner said that or not. If the nurse practitioner said that, they both need fired. Medical did nothing for me at all.
Days later, another prisoner (who shall remain nameless) told me he had a prescription for an antibiotic. It’s the same antibiotic given to me when I had pneumonia. He let me take his pills.
So, for several days, I took antibiotics. By the time I finished what he gave me, my lungs were clear. Clear. And that means the sludge in my lungs was a bacterial infection, since the antibiotics got rid of it.
Three days after the antibiotics ended, the sludge started coming back.
So, I currently have a bacterial infection in my lungs and I have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting medical personnel to get me the antibiotics I need to shake that off before COVID 19 hits here. And
that’s all bad for me.
I can’t use the grievance process because I’m not an “offender” as defined by the rules; I don’t have a conviction in Virginia. And even if I could use it, I’d be dead before I was ever vindicated.
I want to live through this. So, my “play nice” promise to Virginia be damned. Anyone reading this should feel free to contact Buckingham at (434) 983-4400 . Either Warden John Woodson or Assistant Warden Jeffrey Snoddy are here each day during normal business hours. Ask for one, and he’s not there, ask for the other. Feel free to fax this update to them, (434) 983-4017 . Attach your demand that they do something to clear my infection now.

Sean in feb, 2019

Sean has been transferred again, this time to Dillwyn, VA, in the center of the state. We just got word that he’s sitting pretty at Buckingham Correctional Center and can be written at:

Sean Swain #2015638
Buckingham Correctional
PO Box 430
Dillwyn, VA 23936

After 27 years of incarceration in the state of Ohio, Sean Swain must bid a fond “fare-the-well” to his former wardens and jailers. Sean has been transferred to the Commonwealth of Virginia, given a new number and is sitting pretty at Nottoway Correctional Center near to Burkeville, VA. You can write to Sean to let him know you care and let his captors know you’re watching at the following address:

Sean Swain #2015638
Nottoway Correctional Center
P.O. Box 488
Burkeville, VA 23922

We’ll post more updates as they come up as to what this means for his security status, his legal challenges, his options for programs and parole.

Stay Solid,

Sean Swain Supporters

PS: if you feel like checking with his warders in VA on his status, that he’s in good health and getting what he needs, you can ask here:

2892 Schutt Road
P. O. Box 488
Burkeville, VA 23922
(434) 767-5543

A few supporters were able to get over to Youngstown and in to visit Sean in mid February. Sean seems in good spirits and in good health. While at Warren C.I., a certain fartgoblin in the mail room continued to mess with Sean’s mail but no such issues have arisen in the month or so back at OSP and his phone access is up and running. Sean is, however, still without email access for some reason.

A couple of interesting developments have also occurred in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitations and Corruptions (ODRC); Director Gary Mohr has retired and threatened to move to North Carolina to cunsult the NCDHS, which oversees prisons there; and counselor Trevor Clark is no longer employed by ODR, a change which occurred within days of Sean’s public announcement that he had been genitally groped by Clark in 2013. Details will be published as we get them.

He’s also begun producing new segments for The Final Straw, so give a listen to the latest segments!

From Friends of Sean:

Sean is currently facing increased scrutiny and repression from the ODRC in retaliation for his published writings, including loss of privileges and a possible increase in security status. 

On October 1, 2018, Sean ended a 29 day hunger strike. It is no longer necessary to call in to the prison, but it would be a great time to send Sean warm words of encouragement as he recovers from his strike. If you’d like, you can include a couple embossed envelopes in with your letter, available at the post office.