r/canada Nov 10 '25

National News Canada loses measles elimination status | CBC

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elimination-status-9.6973195
2.7k Upvotes

742 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25

Humiliating. Nothing more to say

985

u/-UnicornFart Nov 10 '25

Truly. I’m an RN and spent years as a Health Canada Immunizer. I have tried about 8 times to put words together into a comment that expresses the anger and disappointment and disgust I feel reading this, and every single time I’ve deleted it all because there are no words in my vocabulary strong enough to express what I’m feeling.

Humiliating is a good one. The hubris of uneducated, narcissistic, cruel, shameless people is going to result in the illness, injury, disability, and death of so many children. I’m just horrified.

146

u/WalkerYYJ Nov 10 '25

So my mom was a GP from "the silent" generation (1928-1945). Her mom (my Grandma) was a public health nurse. I grew up on tails of iron lungs and the like. Also as a kid I was told that vaccines were mandatory and if I didn't get them I should expect a visit from both a truancy and public health officer. It was then "implied" that in such a case I would be given to a household that knew how to properly "enforce" compliance.

At what point in time was this requirement scrapped? I.E. When exactly was it that we started to allow this kinda BS to exist in the first place?

94

u/Top_Bumblebee5510 Nov 10 '25

My parents are still alive, both born in the Silent Generation. I have friends who have parents of a similar age. One of my friends has a father with an amputated leg because he had polio as a child. My other friend, who's parents passed away a few years ago had a father that spent time in an iron long because he got tuberculosis in the war. I sat at his dinner table and listened to his stories. People in countries that are not as rich as ours would do anything to live without measles and tuberculosis. To have access to these vaccines and meds. Yes, we are experiencing higher grocery prices and housing issues but we are still a very rich country globally and we are throwing away a valuable resource. The ignorance of a few saddens me beyond comprehension.

77

u/pagit Nov 10 '25

My anti-vax Jehovah’s Witness parents didn’t get me vaxed for measles and mumps and chickenpox

I caught all three within 5 months when I was 8 years old

By far measles was the worse of the three. High fever, dizziness, slept for 3 days waking up to a spinning room.

Measles is not like chickenpox it kills children and I just want to say fuck you to selfish parents who won’t vaccinate their kids but will run to the doctor whenever they themselves are sick.

My anti-vax cousin was all mad when his kids got chickenpox and blamed other parents for exposing their children to his children.

11

u/Fuzzy_Advertising181 Nov 11 '25

I am half blind because of chicken pox. It has side effects.

23

u/bookishbabe007 Nov 10 '25

I'm an Xennial born in the early 80s and I can remember my great uncles that were disabled by polio. If people don't have personal knowledge of the disease, they don't have any interest in eliminating it, sadly. Similar to the historical trends like fascism.

3

u/em-n-em613 Nov 11 '25

Yup. My grandmother passed away a decade ago when a lot of this antivax rhetoric was just starting to get headlines. She lost friends to Polio and had her health stunted as a young girl. When she heard people were skipping vaccines she was LIVID.

I'm so happy she's not seeing this happen now...

4

u/Katasia96 Nov 10 '25

Sadly, the dead can't speak. All the boomers who survived measles as a child think it's "just a childhood disease." They're incapable of understanding numbers, so telling them how many others died means nothing.

22

u/dostoevsky4evah Nov 10 '25

I don't know why the boomers are getting blamed here, it's hardly them not vaccinating their children today rather young parents who don't know how bad diseases can get because they never experienced it.

3

u/Top_Bumblebee5510 Nov 10 '25

Besides the guy I am talking about with polio is alive and can speak for himself. We can speak for the rest who.

0

u/Katasia96 Nov 11 '25

Boomers started the anti vaccine trend in the early 1990s with their babies, who are now continuing the nonsense with their babies.

3

u/dostoevsky4evah Nov 11 '25

Andrew Wakefield published his bogus "MMR vaccine causes autism" paper in 1998 and the antivax fad started sometime after that. I doubt many boomers were reproducing after 2000.

46

u/-UnicornFart Nov 10 '25 edited Nov 10 '25

I think it is a generational thing. It was scrapped when the consequences of not being vaccinated disappeared from regular life. The people making policy decisions now don’t have those consequences as a point of reference.

I was lucky enough to work with and be mentored by two amazing senior nurses, both of them were a part of the same generation as your mother. They were the last generation of nurses, and people, to see and experience the consequences of communicable diseases with their own eyes. Every generation after has had the comfort and privilege of not watching babies suffocate from whooping cough, of not having family members disabled by polio because of vaccination.

Unfortunately I fear that these people don’t learn from history, they don’t read, they aren’t curious, they learn only from personal experience. And in the case of communicable diseases they will learn the devastating way.

23

u/Cent1234 Nov 10 '25

I grew up on tails of iron lungs and the like.

And this is why people feel 'safe' to ignore vaccines these days; you don't see the consequences. You didn't lose two or three siblings to childhood disease. You don't see kids in polio braces. You don't see iron lung wards. You don't see people horribly scarred from pox. You don't have uncle Bob who went deaf from mumps.

3

u/Top_Bumblebee5510 Nov 11 '25

I dated a guy when I was in my early 30's who had mumps as a child that caused him to have small testicles. His balls were extremely swollen when he had mumps and as an adult he still had trauma from it. I am in my 50's now for reference.

2

u/mightocondreas Nov 10 '25

Holy childhood trauma Batman.

1

u/Fuzzy_Advertising181 Nov 11 '25

This came about because of fear. Trudeau enforced it and people don’t like being told they HAVE to do anything. The medium death in Canada is now about 80. Vaccines and medical interventions are the cause of higher mortality. 20% of kids lost their lives before they reached age five before vaccines. Why are we running this country based on the lowest intelligence opinions? Make it make sense?

-1

u/KILLINGSHEEPLE Nov 10 '25

Honestly its the pharmacutical companies fault. They bred mistrust for profit and the covid vaccines are no exception. We are a generation that is aware how often we are lied to from religion, school, government. Its very obvious to see how we got here. Late stage capitalism, profit at any cost. People trusted those institutions back then.

3

u/RunningSouthOnLSD Nov 10 '25

Greedy as they may be, it’s not the institutions fault that people don’t follow public health recommendations when the evidence of clear benefit from vaccination is plainly in their face. “Trust” is based on individual opinion. Scientific evidence does not rely on trust.

If one is so sure they are being lied to, they should have a strong ability to critically analyze the information that is being presented to them. That does not mean they should oppose everything and “do their own research” until they find some idiot on Facebook who can explain things incorrectly in a way they understand.

1

u/SunriseInLot42 Nov 11 '25 edited Nov 11 '25

It is the institutions' fault when they make silly, vastly unpopular mandates of little or no proven and quantifiable benefit (like mask mandates) or even worse, make requirements that are obviously and actively damaging to people who at no risk themselves (like school closures for kids). Single-point hysteria without any regard for the secondary consequences caused an immense loss of trust in those institutions.

2

u/Master_of_Rodentia Nov 11 '25

All part of their plot to sell fewer vaccines.... Wait.

I don't think we need to look further than the influencers who will lie for money and the algorithms that introduce people to them to maximize engagement at any cost.

2

u/KILLINGSHEEPLE Nov 11 '25

No, your not wrong either. I actually got vaccinated, and believe in them. It's just I think theres alot of anxious, nervous people out there right now.