While the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes have been administering the COVID-19 vaccine to tribal members — and now, on a limited basis, to some of their casino employees — the Eastern Pequot Tribe has been struggling to get its elderly members vaccinated. The Easterns’ chairwoman, Katherine Sebastian Dring, believes it’s another consequence of her tribe’s lack of federal recognition, a status the Mashantuckets and Mohegans have long enjoyed. “Here we are, a state-recognized tribe with a reservation established in 1683, scientists have said we need to get vaccinated and we have not been acknowledged as an at-risk population,” Sebastian Dring said Friday. “As Native Americans, we are at risk. That’s a scientific fact.”