NITHA working through vaccination challenges facing Saskatchewan’s north

Some of Saskatchewan’s worst-hit COVID locations throughout the pandemic have been located within the northern portion of the province.

Now that the vaccines have made it to Saskatchewan, health officials are turning their attentions to other challenges facing COVID and the north.

“Currently, (there are challenges) around the vaccines in terms of temperature requirements. Some of the communities are fly-ins, so (they’re) only accessible by air,” Dr. Nnamdi Ndubuka, a medical health officer with the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority (NITHA) said Thursday in a media conference.

“When these vaccines get to some of these remote communities, they need to be in the arms of residents right away. This has been quite a challenge for us … The other challenge that we also anticipated is around vaccine hesitancy.”

The hesitancy around vaccinations has been around the globe and isn’t a problem unique just to Saskatchewan’s north. The issues surrounding those challenges, though, are unique to those northern residents.

They include fear of death following a second dose or a refusal on religious grounds. Some want to wait it out and see what happens, while others have also never taken vaccines in the past. There also are problems with government mistrust and it being an experiment, according to Ndubuka.

“These challenges are real. We can’t just dismiss these concerns. Rather, we have to work with the communities,” he explained.

NITHA says it has been working with community leaders within its Indigenous communities to spread the message, and work on getting the facts to community members.

“Efforts are still ongoing and those messagings are being provided in local language, both in Cree and Dene and also in English,” Ndubuka explained.

“(There is) a wide variety of issues, but we are continuing to work with them to provide information for them to make an informed decision.”

As of Tuesday, Ndubuka said, more than 1,800 vaccines, which includes 135 doses of the Pfizer batch, have been distributed to the NITHA communities.

The northern regions have been some of the hardest hit in Saskatchewan, with per-capita incidence rates six to 10 times higher in some zones than compared to Regina or Saskatoon, according to University of Saskatchewan biomedical professor Kyle Anderson.

Ndubuka said as the vaccines become more widely distributed, he hopes that more of the population is able to buy into its effectiveness.

“We’re hoping that as we move down the list … to those 50 and over, we’ll be able to cover the population to get more vaccines,” he said.

“In terms of timelines as to when we will get to the adults 50 and over in Indigenous communities, we don’t know yet. But as more vaccines come available, we continue to work down that list very quickly to make sure we reach everybody that needs the vaccine.”