Audrey Baulieu: her fight to vaccinate disadvantaged children
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”: Audrey has made Mahatma Gandhi’s famous motto her own. After years of travelling around the world and doing humanitarian fieldwork, she now hopes, through her doctoral project, to make vaccination accessible to the youngest among us.
“Coworking spaces—we were already sold on the idea,” says Audrey Baulieu with a hearty laugh.
Audrey, a trained nurse and now an international development consultant for GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, has been at Montréal CoWork since September.
Although her husband, Danny Forest, owns IDEAL Coworking in the Saint-Henri neighbourhood, Audrey chose to work at Montréal CoWork. Her choice was guided by proximity and convenience, since MCW is next to Arc-en-ciel alternative school, where her son is enrolled.
After years of humanitarian work in conflict zones, Audrey and her family needed to put down roots closer to family in Montréal.
After a childhood divided between Lanaudière and the Outaouais, she began studying nursing at Cégep de l’Outaouais in Gatineau, and then at Université de Montréal. She was embarking on a calling close to her heart: helping and caring for others.
After years working in hospitals, including eight years in emergency and intensive care, she and her husband set off on a year-long trip around the world. That journey sparked a desire to do more and, above all, to contribute to social justice.
Around the world and back to reality
“We had the opportunity to work for an NGO in India; that was my first encounter with public health,” Audrey recounts. There, they discovered different living conditions and witnessed absurd situations that still persist today.
“23% of young girls stop going to school because of their periods. They were missing a week of school every month because, beyond the taboo, they had no toilets where they could change or wash their hands, and they had no sanitary pads,” Audrey describes.
Their trip around the world continued: after travelling through Europe, Turkey and Morocco, and volunteering in Cambodia and South Korea in exchange for a place to sleep, returning to Canada, to Toronto, was a shock.
“After seeing children die of pneumonia and diarrhea, you ask yourself: why? How? When we have all this wealth here,” she continues.
The sense of injustice and, above all, unequal access to services gave rise to profound feelings of powerlessness, uselessness and disconnection. “It changed us deeply. We became aware of our privileges,” she acknowledges. Audrey and her husband were already thinking about leaving again.
Here, the need to help others is not a matter of charity, but of bringing coherence to a world desperately lacking it.
Humanitarian commitment as a response to social inequality
Audrey chose to help others through Médecins sans Frontières in late 2016, taking on six-month assignments.
Between 2017 and 2019, she took on successive assignments as a nursing manager in genuinely high-risk areas.
“On my very first assignment, I was in a vaccination area, in a conflict zone. The Central African Republic has been in conflict since 2013.
The vaccination campaign was a catch-up effort: there were no longer any armed groups in that part of the country, but only 20% of children were vaccinated because of constant interruptions to health care services,” she explains.
Although Audrey became hooked on fieldwork, she eventually returned to Quebec in 2019 to start her family. She would work as a nurse advisor for vaccination among the Cree of James Bay (Eeyou Istchee).
Audrey was juggling everything at once: her master’s degree in public health, her work and her first child, a little boy. Those years were so intensely busy that she still cannot explain how she managed.
An agent of change through research
Although Audrey is not currently working in the field, she is working from Montréal CoWork on her doctorate, specializing in vaccination, with a project focused on “Zero-Dose children.”
“These are children who have never received any routine vaccine. There are 14.2 million of them worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries,” she reports.
Over all these years, Audrey has seen firsthand how important vaccines are in eradicating many diseases and contributing to the health of an entire society.
“There should no longer be any children left behind in low- and middle-income countries,” Audrey says in a heartfelt appeal.
The figures speak for themselves: according to her, almost a third of deaths among children under five in low- and middle-income countries are dose children”. These children face significant barriers to accessing vaccination services and other essential services provided by their governments.
Ironically, Canada has recently experienced a resurgence of measles and lost its disease elimination status. The reason: a decline in vaccination rates fuelled by misinformation, even though we know very well that the vaccine is safe and effective.
Generally, while vaccination against childhood or more serious diseases has become something taken for granted in our wealthy, developed countries of the Global North—because diseases such as polio, diphtheria and whooping cough no longer circulate as much as they once did—we can clearly see the devastation they can cause and the value of vaccination in other countries where many children are incompletely vaccinated, such as Nigeria, Pakistan, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia.
Today, drawing on her experiences and everything she has seen, Audrey has made vaccination her cause. Travelling has taught her so much that it revealed her life’s mission.
“No matter where you go in the world, you will meet fantastic people and have exchanges that will lead you to see what humanity has in common,” she recounts.
And it is this common ground, this openness to others, seeing oneself in another, that makes Audrey want to help children access basic health care vaccines. Not only has Audrey claimed her place, as her grandfather taught her to do as a child, but she has found it by contributing in her own way to changing things.
Article: Hélène Lequitte