Garden River First Nation got to work on immunizing some of the community’s most vulnerable after receiving its first 60-dose allotment of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Friday.
Chief Andy Rickard says elders and frontline healthcare workers will be first in line to receive the initial doses as priority groups in the first phase of the vaccine rollout.
“Today is the first day we’re inoculating our elders in our community, and then from there, we’ll continue to offer it to the rest of the community,” he said.
Rickard tells SooToday that Garden River Wellness Centre Manager Jessica Grawbarger has been working with Garden River's pandemic response coordinator Tanya Boissoneau and a number of other departments to offer a series of curbside clinics.
“I’ve seen their plan – it’s pretty extensive, it’s pretty detailed,” said Rickard. “I think that is what’s important, is that we want to make sure that when we start rolling out these vaccination plans that we have a well-coordinated situation.”
A handful of representatives from Algoma Public Health were on hand for Friday’s curbside vaccination clinic.
“I think it’s going to be fantastic. I think that Jessica [Grawbarger] has looked at the community needs and how to best manage that, so I think it’s going to go pretty smoothly,” said Candice Carter, public health nurse in infectious diseases for Algoma Public Health. “We have a lot of systems and stations in place to make sure that everyone’s going to one station and then the next in a good flow.”
Rickard says the community as a whole felt the effects of the Garden River First Nation’s move to restrict access into the community in April 2020 and January of this year.
But it seems as though there’s a light at the end of the tunnel with the first rollout of the vaccine.
“I think this vaccination provides a little bit of hope knowing that we’ll get back to some sort of normalcy over the next little bit.” he said. “Everybody is pretty happy about that, but also the fact that we don’t have to travel to the Sault or any other community - we can have it here in our own community.”
According to Indigenous Services Canada, more than 113,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in 480 First Nations, Inuit and territorial communities as of Feb. 25 - an immunization rate six times greater than the rest of Canada.
