While I continue to advocate for RSV medicine for term Inuit babies, I have been asked by several Indigenous leaders to help secure more resources as Indigenous communities face COVID-19 in extremely challenging circumstances.

Indigenous leaders are calling for more resources to help deal with COVID-19. I’m reaching out to update you on work I have been engaged in, and see if you would be willing to sign and share another petition calling for fair healthcare for Indigenous communities in Canada in the urgent fight against COVID-19 (change.org/covid19Indigenous).

Please sign and share here: change.org/covid19Indigenous

Many communities suffer from overcrowding, food insecurity, decreased access to healthcare and a higher prevalence of chronic disease. This is a perfect storm for COVID-19. To avoid a catastrophe, human and financial resources are required urgently. Please sign this petition to ask the Federal Government to work with the communities to enhance their capacity to fight COVID-19.

It has been a while since we gave an update on RSV antibodies for Inuit babies. Through your efforts I was able to have a meeting led by Dr. Tom Wong at Indigenous Services on December 16th 2019, followed by January 19th 2020. At the second meeting there were several people there including the deputy CMOH and the CHOH Dr Michael Patterson on the phone.

While through the numerous publications, it is evident that Inuit babies in many rural communities have extremely high rates of RSV associated with extremely high costs. The medical officers of health indicated that the rates of RSV were not that high, and that the evidence that it worked in Nunavik was inconclusive.

While we give RSV antibody to babies across Canada to babies where the risk of admission is about 10% or less, Inuit babies in rural Nunavut who are less than 6 months of age continue to have rates of admission which are much higher than this. Their situation is unique compared to other at-risk populations, as there are no hospitals in their communities they need to be evacuated to southern hospitals by expensive air ambulance. Even if palivizumab (the medicine used to protect against RSV) worked half of the time, prevention is still cheaper than hospitalization.  As well, palivizumb has worked in hundreds of populations around the world, and in our award-winning study, we demonstrated that when given it worked up to 96% of the time. There is no reason why it wouldn’t work if parents and community are educated about what it does, their choices are respected.

This was a deep disappointment to me. As someone who has travelled to numerous remote Indigenous communities across Canada, this was another example of the differential treatment Indigenous people experience. As well, instead of discussing the facts, some people in Nunavut started a smear campaign against me.

On top of that I was grieving the death of my son Nathan, who was adopted from the Arctic when he was 4 months of age. It’s Nathan’s baby picture in the petition, as I know he would have supported this. My son and I were dismissed by the mental health community when he was in crisis, and he took his life at the age of 14 in September 2018, just like his brother in the Arctic.

I began to believe that the differential treatment of Indigenous peoples was not going to change anytime soon. I hit a wall… and I didn’t know what to say…

Then the community members and mayors in Nunavut, told me that RSV was a very important issue, and that we needed to continue to fight. With help from the community  we will first need to designate rural term Inuit babies as high risk for severe RSV, and secondly advocate for them to have equitable access to prevention and treatment as other high risk infants. We started regrouping around this with the community...

Then an urgent danger emerged… COVID-19.  

Please sign and share: change.org/covid19Indigenous

Thank you for all for all the work you do advocating for change.

-Dr. Anna Banerji O.Ont MD MPH FRCPC DTM&H