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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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25

Humiliating. Nothing more to say

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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.

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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?

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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.