'It's the first we've heard about Covid': 'Forgotten' Amazon tribes are vaccinated for disease they'd never heard of until Peruvian medical team arrives by boat with shots for everyone
'It's the first we've heard about Covid': 'Forgotten' Amazon tribes are vaccinated for disease they'd never heard of until Peruvian medical team arrives by boat with shots for everyone
'Forgotten' indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest have finally been made aware of the global Covid pandemic more than 18 months after the world was plunged into lockdown.
Mariano Quisto, a remote community leader deep in the dense forests of Peru, first learned of the global pandemic in October when health workers arrived by boat at his isolated village with vaccines.
'We didn't know about COVID-19. This is the first we are hearing about it,' Quisto said through a translator from the village of Mangual, in Peru's vast but sparsely populated Loreto region in the country's north.
Government health workers and International Red Cross members arrived in Quisto's Urarina indigenous community last month after a three-day boat ride along rivers starting from the Amazonian city of Iquitos, the world's largest metropolis that is unreachable by road.
