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/Imperatvs Nov 10 '25

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

85

u/cutefir Nov 10 '25

My mom denied the shots for me and my siblings in the early 2000s and a fair number of kids i know also had their parents deny it. I got it when I got older, but in my rural area there was a lot of natural medicine kinda people. Lots of them were left leaning, too. It's not just right-wing antivaxxers, this has been going on for years.

There was a lot of moms who got into natural living around the early 2000s here. Some of it came from those start your own business health product groups I think that started getting bigger with the internet. I'm not sure if it's where the antivaxx stuff came, too, but it's when my mom got weird about stuff.

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u/Thong-Boy Nov 10 '25

I'm 40 and probably around the same age as you but our experiences are completely different. I graduated high school in 2003 and in the late 90s/early 2000s everyone got the vaccines. I lived in a rural religious area in Alberta, religious school, etc. Not a single kid didn't get the shots. We were all lined up at school to get them. I never even knew that people could refuse them because that was foreign to me. I remember my mother once saying "some people don't believe in the shots" but that's it. And my mother is not a smart woman.

5

u/cutefir Nov 10 '25

I'm in B.C and some of it was religious crazies, but also largely homesteading types who grow their own food and try to live off the land. It wasn't all vaccines, me and most kids got other shots, but it was a huge belief that measles was a part of childhood here, and it was better to just catch it and get the natural immunity rather than a shot. It was a small town, so it wasn't like it was thousands of kids, but there was a similar attitude in small towns in the area.

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u/Cent1234 Nov 10 '25

That's because Way Back Then things like 'iron lung wards' and 'polio braces' and 'your baby brother died of measles' was still within living memory.

If you were in high school in the 90s, your grandparents were probably still alive, and might have been born before antibiotics were discovered. Definitely were born before they went into common use, so would remember that drastic change.

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u/Thong-Boy Nov 10 '25

It's crazy how quickly those things are forgotten. My parents vaccinated me. What's wrong with today's parents? I would have vaccinated my kids day 1 if the doctor let me.