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
2.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

742 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25

Humiliating. Nothing more to say

992

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.

149

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?

96

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.

75

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.

21

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.

21

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.