Lack of access to clean drinking water and low-quality health care have had a direct impact of Indigenous people’s vulnerability to COVID-19, according to a B.C. expert. Kimberly Huyser, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has been studying Indigenous people’s health in relation to the pandemic since it began. She said it wasn’t the specific virus that interested her, but rather the way it highlighted how health care often fails Indigenous people in North America.