How to Vaccinate a Siberian Reindeer Herder
The New York Times
Covid has reached even the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic. So vaccination teams are following, and finding ways to inoculate nomadic herders.
The Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is one of the few remaining places on Earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional culture. On the tundra, the Nenets, an Indigenous minority in the Russian north, follow a lifestyle shaped by the seasonal migrations of the reindeer they herd.
While Covid brought travel to a halt in much of the world, the Nenets of Yamal kept moving. From December to April, the herders deploy their camps and pasture their reindeer in the Nadymski district, a region of some 40,000 square miles at the base of the Yamal Peninsula and centered on the city of Nadym. In mid-April they begin “kaslanie,” a season of nomadism, traveling with their herds some 400 miles up the peninsula and moving camp 30 to 100 times during the year.
But the pandemic has reached even here. More than 100 new cases of the coronavirus are recorded in the region every day, as well as three to five deaths among infected patients.
