He didn’t get any of that. Instead, on April 26, three nights before the pop-up clinic went live, Hamid and his team were sent a location code and the phone number of the general Peel vaccine booking line with copious instructions for the mosque to send to its community: have your health card ready, call the number between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and provide the location code to the representative. They were given just 500 doses.

At first, the instructions were only shared in a WhatsApp group between the mosque’s administration with a message to “pleeeeeease don’t forward.” Minutes later, it was circulating in other WhatsApp groups. On Tuesday morning, MNN shared the instructions to its mailing list of 1,500 people. That afternoon, local Mississauga City Councillor Sue McFadden shared it with her mailing list of thousands more.

Nakib Khan, a 35-year-old marketing manager who lives close to MNN, called in just before the line opened at 8 a.m. He was given three options for an age group or a health condition, none of which applied to him. Somehow he got through (the trick was to press zero). He was 100th in line and was told the wait would be 15 minutes. He put his phone on speaker and started working. Two and a half hours later, the music stopped playing. The phone line was so overwhelmed, it stopped working for everyone.

Khan didn’t hang up. The phone stayed silent for another hour. His group chats exploded with friends trying to dial back in, only to receive a busy tone. When the call abruptly ended, Khan attempted to call back some 80 times. Just past noon, a Peel representative picked up but she couldn’t hear him properly. Khan panicked and made a three-way call with another phone to try to fix the problem. “I literally begged her to stay on the line with me,” he said. “I tried to make her understand, this was an almost four-hour ordeal.”

Khan felt frustrated but fortunate to get an appointment. But he also felt guilty: “Peel is home to so many essential workers. They deserve it more than me and I’m not sure it’s fair that I got it because I’m a bit more tech-savvy and had time at my disposal.”

Peel region was full of such stories this past week. Those lucky to get a vaccine appointment tried unconventional methods, like getting family members abroad to call in at an early hour to beat the line. Some created an impromptu pay it forward system, where the first person to get through would also make a booking for someone else, who in turn would book for someone else, and so forth. Some took shifts, like a husband and wife who took turns watching their newborn while the other tried calling.

It was clear that Peel was desperate for vaccines. According to charts from Bill Comeau with data from covid19tracker.ca and the Covid-19 Canada Open Data Working Group, while Peel region (population: 1.54 million) has consistently had the highest number of new weekly COVID cases per 100,000, it has remained near the bottom in vaccine access, with smaller cities like Kingston and Sudbury sitting near the top. That is slowly changing: in the past week, Peel has climbed from 24th to 16th in the province in total doses per 100 people. That per capita number, however, doesn’t come close to truly reflecting the disparity in need for the vaccine given Peel’s extremely high infection rates.

In May, after months of pleading and begging from Peel’s mayors, local health officials, doctors and residents, the region, which sees 20 percent of Ontario’s cases despite being home to just ten percent of the population, will finally receive almost 20 percent of Ontario’s vaccine allocation. The region of Peel may have had good intentions to get these doses to its most vulnerable and marginalised populations, but the first week of vaccine rollout showed it wasn’t prepared.

“Peel did its best, but unfortunately they didn’t anticipate the pent up demand in the community,” said Hamid. “I was under the impression that they are a big organization so they must already have a good system going. It never occurred to me that we would have this kind of difficulty.”

Those who were part of setting up these clinics describe a piecemeal process that saw multiple government agencies, private companies, community advocates, and partners rushedly working together to administer vaccines. Even though these pop-up clinics had been part of Peel’s mass immunization plan since January, they were put together in a matter of days. There was no central booking system, no one copy-and-paste design for every clinic to use, and no clear, inclusive plan that would vaccinate every single Peel resident. While the community clinics are working smoothly—there are no long lines or waits—the path to get a life-saving vaccine for those most at-risk of COVID is not fair, simple, or straightforward.

“It’s a chaotic operation and everyone still doesn’t fully understand the vaccine playbook,” said one health official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “In Peel, everyone’s lives are on the line and it is evident that strong systems are still not in place to protect them.”

As frustrating and inequitable as this process was, there were limited options for the region’s over 1.4 million people to get vaccinated. At the moment, there are only three hospitals and one health care centre administering vaccines across Mississauga, Brampton, and the town of Caledon, which sprawls across 1,250 square kilometres. Each one is only accessible by car or public transit. The same is true for all seven mass vaccination clinics in the region.

This is why the administration of these places of worship, along with their community partners, approached Peel Public Health in February to offer their spaces for vaccine delivery. The Canadian Muslim COVID-19 Task Force, a group of Muslim doctors, faith leaders, community advocates and more, proactively led this outreach in an effort to bridge the gaps of the government’s pandemic response. Rufaida Mohammed, co-chair of the task force, said the group became “an intermediary” between public health officials and the community, making connections to local sites that could become clinics. “We have helped open the door to these groups for Peel so they could reach everyone in the hardest hit pockets,” she said. Other cultural groups did the same: a relationship with Peel Public Health was the lifeline their community needed.

“We’re running two races,” Laundry said. “One is a sprint to the frontline with the people willing to be vaccinated. The other race is a marathon: the race to get the last person vaccinated.”

“I keep saying this: just because you build a vaccine clinic doesn’t necessarily mean they will all come,” Laundry added. “In fact, if you build it, maybe half of them will come.”

The feeling is shared by all four places of worship across Peel that have become makeship vaccine clinics in the last few days. These spaces have ties to large groups of people that trust them. When the pandemic began, that trust became more important: even though they were shuttered, places of worship provided guidance from a distance on everything from masking to social support in multiple languages across multiple mediums.

“Everyone in our community knows of somebody who has been infected and died from this virus,” said BIC’s Muntaz Alli. “Even if we can’t open this space for prayers, we want to do whatever we can to protect the community.”

Peel region says they’re trying to get to everyone. They’ve already gone into 140 congregate settings, including retirement homes, shelters, and jails. The region’s four mass vaccination clinics are now working like clockwork, according to Laundry, giving local public health officials time to devote more attention to mobile and community clinics. Then, two weeks ago, the Ontario government gave Peel some support to set up workplace and community clinics: the province directed a third-party provider to help with the planning and logistical set-up. For Ontario Khalsa Darbar, for example, that third-party provider is Amazon Canada. (Neither Peel or Amazon Canada responded by the time of publication to The Local’s request for more information about this partnership.)

To help direct where community clinics needed to be set up, Peel’s immunization strategy established a Community Response Table, which includes over 90 local community partners and agencies and faith groups. The region started with a pilot vaccine program for around 1,000 special education teachers on April 24 and 25 to quickly see what worked and what didn’t. Then as more doses started arriving in Peel, they approached community groups with tight timelines to set up targeted clinics. The four places of worship were given between seven and nine days to set up.

In that time, BIC’s Muntaz Alli said the mosque recruited dozens of volunteers to help with traffic flow and rapid outreach. Three days before launch, the mosque was sent tables, chairs and partitions. Two days before launch, the mosque received a fridge with vaccines, along with a security officer, and what Alli called “a clinic in a box” with all the equipment needed to administer vaccines. A day before launch, they had a trial run.

This logistical process is unique to Peel. The nature of transmission and the community it is hitting is different here, with most cases starting in workplaces and spreading to multigenerational households and the larger community. That kind of spread couldn’t be handled with “the cookie-cutter approach” the province was advising all public health units to use, Mohammed said. Peel needed something more novel and innovative. It needed all hands on deck.

“Unfortunately, while we may have perfected how Peel’s community clinics operate, we didn’t do enough to bring the hardest-hit people to them,” said one clinic volunteer who was not authorized to speak. “If we’re not doing that, what’s the point of a community clinic?”

The stark proof of this disparity was the hijab-clad woman who was directing people to registration at the entryway of MNN. Shagufta Zia, a worker at Amazon, had taken the day off work, unpaid, to volunteer at the community clinic because “helping to protect my community was important.” She still hasn’t been vaccinated and didn’t have a booking at the clinic.

The Local’s ongoing vaccination coverage is made possible through the generous support of the Vohra Miller Foundation.