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In remote corners of Alaska, getting the new COVID-19 vaccines into people's arms is no small logistical feat. Tribal health care providers are mustering a fleet of bush planes, snow machines, even sleds. Nat Herz with Alaska Public Media has the story.
NAT HERZ, BYLINE: About 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the tiny northwest Alaska village of Ambler, Dr. Katrine Bengaard is on a mission to deliver some of the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine, a job that requires her to jump on the back of a snow machine. When Bengaard recorded this sound, she was visiting a 92-year-old elder who couldn't make it to the village clinic to get the vaccine. On that day, Bengaard flew to three different villages. And in some instances, she rode on sleds pulled behind a snow machine.
KATRINE BENGAARD: We were also, of course, holding on to all our bags, all of our equipment that we were bringing with us for the vaccinations.
HERZ: This was how she and her team got from the airport into town.
BENGAARD: Our job was to keep ourselves as well as all the luggage in the sled as we bounced along through the snow.
HERZ: Clinicians are giving the shots in rural Alaska on frigid airport tarmacs and at village clinics. It's far more complicated than in most places because villages don't have infrastructure like ultracold freezers, and many aren't even connected by roads.
ELLEN HODGES: We were on, like, plan four by halfway through the first day.
HERZ: Ellen Hodges is a doctor and chief of staff at the tribal health care organization in southwest Alaska. Its airborne vaccine program is called Project Togo, a nod to the legendary Alaska sled dog that helped mush life-saving serum to Nome during a diphtheria outbreak a century ago. Hodges asked to be on the first of many chartered flights. Then when her plane landed in subzero temperatures...
HODGES: It became immediately apparent that the vaccine was going to freeze in the middle part of the needle.
HERZ: A very Alaska problem.
HODGES: So I would have, you know, the vaccines tucked in my shirt until right before we gave them.
HERZ: More than 25,000 Alaskans have received their first dose of the vaccine. The state now has one of the nation's highest coronavirus vaccination rates in the U.S. In addition to frontline health care workers, older people like Donny Olson are receiving the vaccine, too. Olson is Inupiaq and a state senator who lives in the remote western Alaska village of Golovin. He's also a pilot and has a radio at his house tuned to air traffic so he can hear who's coming in.
DONNY OLSON: When the caravan came flying over and we heard it on the radio, you know, we could breathe a little easier that they're here.
HERZ: Olson headed to the clinic for his shot.
OLSON: And when they landed and I got the steel treatment in the shoulder, that was a great relief for us as a whole family.
HERZ: The Trump administration has made special shipments of vaccine to Alaska's tribal health organizations. They're being used to vaccinate a wider population of people than those who currently have access in Alaska's cities. Public health experts say that's appropriate because of tribes' federally recognized sovereignty and the unique risk factors in rural areas like multigenerational homes and distance from advanced medical care. Katrine Bengaard, the doctor who delivered vaccines by sled and snow machine, says she was struck by her patients' gratitude.
BENGAARD: One thing that a lot of us feel when we live and work out here is that we're a little bit forgotten. But I feel like with the way that this COVID vaccine has been distributed, we don't feel forgotten at all.
HERZ: Especially when clinicians fly back to villages to deliver the second shots.
For NPR News, I'm Nat Herz in Anchorage.
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