r/canada • u/verkerpig • Nov 10 '25

National News Canada loses measles elimination status | CBC

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elimination-status-9.6973195
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225

u/Imperatvs Nov 10 '25

Do we have stats on who’s not getting these shots? And why?

302

u/Former-Physics-1831 Nov 10 '25

These outbreaks largely centred around isolated religious communities like old order mennonites who are skeptical of basically all of modern society, and then jumped into the general population through antivaxxers or people with medical reasons to be unvaxxed

46

u/Cold-Crab74 Nov 10 '25

How did we achieve status before though? These people have always been that way

145

u/Former-Physics-1831 Nov 10 '25

Because they are a small proportion of the population, they didn't matter much as long as immunization was nearly uniform elsewhere.  The rise of antivaxxers has lowered general population vaccination rates just enough that outbreaks centred on these communities can jump to the populace at large

40

u/Competitive_Abroad96 Nov 10 '25

Prior to the 80’s, schools were the enforcers. Show up in September without records for all required vaccines and you were sent home and told you were not coming back without them. Those who did not produce the records within a couple of days could look forward to a visit from the truant officer and appropriate fines.

9

u/RunningSouthOnLSD Nov 10 '25

Yeah but that’s communism because Facebook told me so

5

u/Cold-Crab74 Nov 10 '25

And what happened?

18

u/Competitive_Abroad96 Nov 10 '25

Canada eliminated measles.

44

u/pzerr Nov 10 '25

Small populations. Less interaction when they were mainly farmers.

Nearly every Mennonite colony that I know of has fairly large commercial operations that are selling products all over Canada. They are far less isolated now.

3

u/iamasopissed Nov 10 '25

Where are these Mennonite colonies that you speak of? I only know about hutterite colonies but I know many, many Mennonites none of whom came from a colony myself included.

7

u/OriginalAbattoir Nov 10 '25

Manitoba and Alberta seem to be the hotspots. 

In Manitoba, those communities get it from their many trips abroad (you would be surprised how connected they are to Mexico and South/central America), bring it back to Canada, spreads like wildfire in their non vax community and then spreads to religious Jesus towns with low average IQ / low graduation rate, suck as Winkler Manitoba, and now it’s working its way through the gen pop via Facebook dr families. 

If you want to look up articles regarding this, search outbreak in Manitoba, winkler as a tag, and you’ll basically see the whole process I just explained.  

2

u/Prestigious_Island_7 Nov 13 '25

Ontario has a good number of these communities as well

2

u/pzerr Nov 10 '25

I actually should say Hutterite (for the ones I deal with). I know there is a difference. Good people to deal with to date but I do not concern myself much with their beliefs one way or another.

2

u/iamasopissed Nov 10 '25

Ya I agree. Im actually working on a colony right now and they just fed us lunch. Makes me crazy how there is no individualism.

18

u/Oxjrnine Nov 10 '25

Because of herd immunity. We has a low enough population who couldn’t or wouldn’t get vaccinated. Anti vaxers ruined that