First Nations watch, wait as Manitoba vaccine task force meets

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This article was published 29/12/2020 (1899 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Despite making up an increasing share of Manitoba’s COVID-19 hospitalizations, Indigenous communities still have no clue when they’ll get vaccinated.

For the coming weeks, only health-care workers are getting shots, the province has said.

“Our acute care system needs that stability,” Dr. Jazz Atwal, acting deputy chief provincial public health officer, told reporters Tuesday.

“We have to look at that hierarchy (and) understand where the risk is (and) protect those (who) have impact, from a risk perspective — and also from an operations perspective.”

He was speaking hours before a Tuesday meeting to sort out who will receive the first doses of the Moderna vaccine, which can be kept in a regular freezer. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, currently only available within Winnipeg, must be stored at ultra-cold temperatures.

Indigenous leaders have argued their people need to be among the first in line, because of a substantially higher death rate and poor access to health care.

Ottawa has asked the provinces to include Indigenous people in vaccine planning and include them as a priority group, but publicly has refused to compel provinces to actually do so.

Atwal argued Tuesday that Manitoba’s entire health-care system would collapse if nurses and doctors weren’t at the front of the line for shots.

“We have limited supplies of vaccine, and we have health-care workers all across Manitoba in different jurisdictions and in First Nations communities, or servicing First Nations,” he said.

Yet, Dr. Barry Lavallee, who oversees a First Nations health body for northern Manitoba, said the strain on the province’s health system is resulting from Indigenous people falling ill.

“Our leadership wants First Nations prioritized,” Lavallee told the Free Press. “We have 30 per cent of the population who are hospitalized (due to COVID-19) and (occupy) 40 to 45 per cent of ICU beds.”

The province’s vaccine task force met Tuesday afternoon to go over those plans.

After weeks of demands from Indigenous leaders, the group now includes Lavallee as well as another First Nations doctor (a medical officer under Manitoba’s public health team), but there is still no Métis representative.

Meanwhile, Northern Ontario chiefs have already come up with a plan in lockstep with their provincial government for a Moderna rollout in Indigenous communities.

Lavallee said it was necessary to be part of the task force to understand who is actually being prioritized, with both Manitoba’s regional chiefs complaining for weeks the province had left them in the dark.

“The guidelines from public health are to give the initial vaccines to people 80 years of age and over. But our (First Nations) life expectancy is 10 or 11 years younger in Manitoba,” Lavallee said. “We have people dying younger — our average age is 65, versus 80-plus.”

First Nations are disproportionately getting infected and having severe outcomes, both within the city of Winnipeg, and in remote communities. Many reserves have cramped housing and high diabetes rates, helping a handful of COVID-19 cases ripple out into dozens of infections.

Though the province seems to have hit the apex of its second COVID-19 wave a month ago, First Nations have taken on an increasing share of the active cases since then.

First Nations make up about 10.5 per cent of Manitoba’s population.

Meanwhile, the province has sent out six advanced care paramedics to remote First Nations reserves for a short-term deployment between the holidays.

Shared Health chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa said the six are supporting nursing stations Dec. 27-30 at the request of Ottawa, as staff take holiday leave. They are working at the Shamattawa, Bunibonibee, and Wasagamack reserves.

— with files from Kevin Rollason

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca