The coronavirus has spread into the most remote villages, a reminder of earlier pandemics that ravaged the state. Now there is a rush to deliver vaccines in time.

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By Mike Baker and Serge F. Kovaleski

Photographs by Ash Adams

BIRCH CREEK, Alaska — As the turboprop plane rumbled to a halt at the edge of a frozen landing strip, Vennessa Joseph and her fellow villagers were racing to meet it, their snow mobiles kicking up a flurry of powder behind them.

Within minutes, six residents of Birch Creek, bundled in parkas and gloves in the 25-below-zero afternoon, had piled into the fraying seats, and the engine was roaring again. As the plane lifted off to the north, headed toward Fort Yukon, Ms. Joseph looked out across the vast wetlands, where stunted spruce trees cast long shadows in the winter sun.

Vaccination day had arrived.

With a population of about two dozen that relies on a subsistence life, fishing pike in the summer and hunting moose in the fall, Birch Creek operates like numerous villages in Alaska, with no road access, no running water and no neighbors for miles. But despite the natural isolation — more than 100 miles from Fairbanks and on the edge of the Arctic Circle — the coronavirus had still managed to find its way in. In the fall, Ms. Joseph was laid up for days with illness. People in two of the nearest villages died.

In a state where the Indigenous population has been ravaged by global disease outbreaks for generations, the coronavirus pandemic has killed Alaska Natives at quadruple the rate of white residents. The virus has taken hold in remote communities, setting up an urgent race between infections and vaccinations during a season in which weather can limit travel, the sun may only wink above the horizon and large, multigenerational families are crowded indoors.

When the pandemic began a year ago, Alaska’s isolation was an asset that provided villages an opportunity to set up lockdowns, testing requirements and controls on travel.

But as the virus has slowly seeped across the state, the rising infections have demonstrated how quickly isolation can turn into a liability. In Pilot Station, a 37-year-old man died after weather prevented a medevac plane from reaching him. The virus has raged in some communities that have minimal sanitation, in some cases infecting more than 60 percent of residents.

Yet thanks to the steady supply of vaccines available to Native Alaska tribes and a massive delivery effort involving bush planes, boats, sleds and snow mobiles, 16 percent of the population has received a second dose of the vaccine, the highest in the nation. One of the regional operations, Operation Togo, harks back to the grueling 1925 sled dog run that rushed diphtheria antitoxin across the state to an outbreak in Nome.

The villages also have resources they lacked a century ago, when the 1918 flu wiped out more than half of some communities. A network of tribal health aides provide frontline health care and critical testing, treatment and telemedicine links with faraway hospitals — a network being considered for replication in the Lower 48.

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