Photo: Dr. Katrine Bengaard via GMA. Bengaard and three fellow healthcare workers deliver Covid-19 vaccines to rural Alaskans.
Based in Kotzebue, Alaska, an all-female team of four remarkable healthcare heroes -- a doctor, two nurses and a pharmacist -- are braving frigid conditions to get the Covid-19 vaccine to the most remote villages. Whether by plane, boat, sled or snowmobile, with subzero temperatures and only a few hours of daylight each day, the team travel via Alaskan "bush plane" and then onto a sled attached to a snowmobile to remote villages of 200 people to reach elders waiting to be vaccinated. In the case of home-bound elders, the team would make home visits. For a 92-year-old elder whose parents survived the 1918 Spanish flu that had devastated native Alaskans, receiving the vaccine was incredibly meaningful to her and her family. Nurse Heather Kenison described wrapping the vaccine in a protective envelope and carrying it like a baby in her jacket so that the vaccine would not freeze inside the needle along the frigid snowmobile-sled transit route. "We did the best we could. We had to kind of come up with it in the moment," Dr. Katrine Bengaard told Good Morning America. So far, the four health care workers have traveled hundreds of miles to multiple villages to deliver 65 vaccinations. "We got to go from car to commercial airline, got picked up in a Sno-Go with a sled behind it, then we got on charter air, then we got picked up by a four-wheeler with a little trailer behind it, more Sno-Go, more sled," described nurse James Austin V. "We made it work, and we had a really good time together," added Bengaard. "We were all willing to crawl around trying to get into this tiny little plane. We were all willing to do what we needed to do."
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