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Health

Alaska's Vaccination Campaign

May 15, 2021

Fort Yukon in Alaska is one of the most remote villages in the world, and people here are also afraid of Coronavirus. But now that vaccinations are being carried out, scattered families are difficult to reach.

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Fort Yukon lies eight kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Most of the 500 or so inhabitants are Indigenous members of the Gwich'in tribe. Debra McCarty runs the local hospital and, as a result, is also responsible for vaccinating the village’s inhabitants. Some of the families she is trying to reach are only accessible by plane and snowmobile. The people here have heard of the dangerous coronavirus, and that’s why they pretty much everyone wants to be vaccinated - no matter how remote they are. They say that catching the virus here in the wilderness is pretty much fatal. DW reporter Oliver Sallet traveled to Fort Yukon to report on how people living close to the Arctic Circle are handling the pandemic.