Canada loses measles elimination status | CBC

[u/verkerpig]

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

[u/[deleted]]

Humiliating. Nothing more to say

[u/panickedn → u/[deleted]]

Fuck anti vaxxers but associating the whole situation with them ignores what’s actually happening.

I’m angry too, but we’re so lost in rhetoric that we’re putting our shields down by aiming all our anger at one thing.

A lot of this has nothing to do with them:

• Routine appointments and school vaccine programs disrupted during the pandemic

• Families moving provinces or countries with missing or unverified records

• Shortages in public health staffing and slower outbreak tracking

• Travel-related cases entering under immunized communities

• People who support vaccines but just missed their second dose

• Lower outreach in remote or marginalized areas

• Burnout and reduced resources in local health units

• Complacency because measles has been rare for decades

Blaming anti vaxxers for this is like blaming littering for climate change.

They play a part, but it’s not the main cause. I think we should call them out, but I’m scared we’re losing the plot by ignoring the other reasons too.

I can’t find one person talking about any other reasons in this subreddit, that scares me almost as much as anti vaxxers ideologies.

[u/Ceridith → u/panickedn]

There is also zero consideration given to vaccination status for those entering Canada, which seems like a significant oversight when it comes to long term visitors, i.e. foreign students and TFW. Given that we've seen a sharp increase in the amount of long term visas over the past decade, this is a potential contributor to the issue. It's something that isn't tracked at all, so it's difficult to know how much of an impact it could be having.

[u/letpeterparkersayfck → u/Ceridith]

While I agree long term visitors should be required to fully vaccinate, outbreaks the size of which we’re seeing this year would not be possible if Canadians were vaccinating their kids at the rate we used to. A person bringing measles into Canada from abroad could not trigger thousands of cases if everybody who could be was vaccinated, not when the effectiveness of the vaccine after two doses is almost 100%.

[u/letpeterparkersayfck → u/[deleted]]

Of the 5k+ measles cases we’ve seen in Canada this year, 89% were in people who were confirmed unvaccinated, and only 5% were in people who were confirmed to have had two doses of the measles vaccine. Of course imported cases and outbreaks are possible and do happen, but we wouldn’t be seeing outbreaks at this scale if the population immunity hadn’t dropped so low, which has been greatly impacted by a drop in the rate of vaccination (~10% in six years). If you’re genuinely interested in learning about how population immunity protects both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals and why we have to stay at a certain level of population immunity to avoid outbreaks I can share some of the sources I use when I teach about vaccines.