'It's one by one': Community workers keen to tackle Montreal's pockets of unvaccinated
CBC
Last April, Sylvain Pilote and his team of community workers hit the streets of Montreal's LaSalle borough to spread the word about the benefits of getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
Known as the Orange Brigade, the workers fanned out, going door to door and handing out pamphlets, in English and French, but also in Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian and Ukrainian. Finding the right approach sometimes took time.
In the neighbourhood of LaSalle Heights, home to many new immigrants and low-income families, residents were often out working during the day, so the community brigade learned they had to visit peoples' homes in the evening.
"We didn't pass once — we went there seven times, knocking at those doors," said Pilote, who runs Loisirs Laurendeau-Dunton, a local community group. The personalized approach won people over.
"It's not a big lineup: it's one by one," he said. "It's slow, but we need to be there."
Campaigns like the Orange Brigade were part of a concerted effort by community groups and public health officials in pockets across Montreal island to get the message across to residents and to make the vaccine available near where people live.
Now, a year later, with 83 per cent of Montreal's population having received two doses, much of the funding for that kind of campaigning has dried up, and it's no longer happening.
But in some neighbourhoods, the rate of vaccine uptake is still far lower than the city average.
LaSalle Heights is one of those neighbourhoods. Only 62 per cent of the population is vaccinated — more than 20 percentage points below the city average.
Pilote said another round of meeting with residents and speaking with them one on one is the best way to counter misinformation about the vaccine.
For the initial blitz, a private foundation helped him assemble a team of 20 people who visited 20,000 LaSalle residents over four months. Pilote said with so many still wary of the vaccine, money is needed once again to relaunch that campaign.
Vaccination rates are also sluggish elsewhere in the Montreal area, including in parts of Outremont, Lachine, Saint-Michel and Montréal-Nord.
Given the emergence of the more transmissible Omicron variant, experts say maximizing the vaccination rate and encouraging everyone to get a booster shot will be crucial in minimizing the number of people who end up in hospital or dying — and allowing the city to open up.
In a statement, Quebec's Health Ministry said it's working on a new campaign to encourage people to get their booster and will target areas with lower vaccination rates in the coming weeks.