Only 7 in 10 Ontario kids vaccinated against measles, rates falling elsewhere. Here's why
Public confidence in vaccines has dipped since COVID’s first surges, the proportion of parents “really against” routine childhood immunizations has grown and one third of Canadians believe the discredited claim that the measles vaccine causes autism, surveys show.
That percolating pushback is contributing to gaps in immunization coverage: only seven out of 10 kids aged seven in Ontario were reported to be fully immunized against measles in the 2023-24 school year. Rates plummeted below 50 per cent in some health units, despite catch-up programs to deal with a backlog of children who missed shots during COVID disruptions.
The gaps threaten to widen and feed a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases like the ongoing outbreak of measles, say those who study the phenomenon.
But vaccine hesitancy goes beyond autism. The motives of parents opting out are “often far more complex and nuanced than the pro-side would like to admit,” according to the authors of a recently-published paper on English-speaking Canada’s growing anti-vaccine movement.
It may make for a quicker and easier narrative to say it’s all about misinformation and a notoriously flawed study that was eventually withdrawn, “and convince people that it was a mistake and that there is nothing to be concerned about,” said co-author and University of Guelph historian Catherine Carstairs.
However, “it’s become much grittier and more complicated, and maybe requires different kinds of interventions,” she said.
Growing vaccine hesitancy, and outright refusal, is also symbolic of a broader issue, said the University of Alberta’s Timothy Caulfield — “the rise of an anti-science ethos that is impacting society.”
The controversies and polarizations surrounding the COVID vaccines also had an ideological spillover effect on vaccines more generally, Caulfield said. In the U.S., political liberals became more positive towards non-COVID shots like MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), influenza and chickenpox while conservatives became more negative .
Ontario has now claimed more measles cases since last fall than all of the United States. So far, the majority have been concentrated in specific health units, but measles is so highly infectious it can easily leak out to vulnerable pockets with less-than-optimal vaccination rates.
As criticism of Ontario’s handling of the outbreak intensifies, Premier Doug Ford Wednesday said getting children vaccinated against measles is a “no-brainer” and that the province has sufficient supplies of vaccines available. “I encourage anyone and everyone,” Ford told reporters. “You need to get your kids vaccinated, because if not it just starts spreading.”
Cases in Ontario reached 1,383 this week, Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, told Radio-Canada, an increase of 140 over the previous week. Moore anticipates the province will see 100 to 150 new cases a week until summer.
“I’m happy that (local public health units) are able to keep the numbers to 100 to 150 Ontarians that are getting infected on a weekly basis. To me that’s tremendous, hard and difficult work,” he told Radio-Canada.
At least 84 outbreak cases in Ontario have required hospitalization; eight were admitted to intensive care. Among those hospitalized, 80 were unvaccinated, including 63 children.
Alberta, meanwhile, is ramping up measles vaccination clinics in south and central zones where most of the 265 cases reported as of Monday are located.
Canada’s outbreak has been traced to a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last October and has continued to spread in Ontario, with related cases reported in Alberta, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. A single case was reported in Halifax, N.S., this week, in an adult who had travelled to the U.S.
Measles has been eliminated in Canada since 1998; endemic transmission, meaning a disease is constantly circulating, “no longer happens in Canada,” according to the federal government’s measles monitoring report , though sporadic cases can occur, usually due to travel to regions where measles is circulating. However, Canada hasn’t seen close to the current numbers since the 752 cases recorded during a Quebec outbreak in 2011.
The vast majority of cases today are among unvaccinated children and youth. Most (90 per cent) were exposed in Canada.
The bulk of cases — 84 per cent — are in Ontario, where only seven in 10 (70.4 per cent) of seven-year-olds were said to be fully immunized against measles in the 2023-2024 school year , a dramatic drop compared to pre-Covid years. In 2019-2020, 86 per cent of Ontario kids aged seven were fully immunized against measles.
In the 2013-2014 school year, 94 per cent were.
Measles is considered one of the most, if not the most, transmissible, airborne viruses affecting humans. An infected person can pass the virus on to 15 to 18 others who haven’t been vaccinated or who aren’t immune due to past exposure to the virus.
There are no specific anti-virals against measles. In serious cases, the virus can attack the fatty protective sheath that wraps around the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. One in 1,000 children infected can develop post-infectious encephalomyelitis, or swelling of the brain, that can lead to permanent neurological deficits like deafness, paralysis or difficulty thinking or speaking.
Two doses of vaccine are considered about 97 per cent effective against infection. But vaccine coverage is falling below 95 per cent, the threshold needed for herd immunity to prevent infections.
Why are more parents rejecting routine childhood shots? A 2024 Angus Reid pol l found that one in six (17 per cent) parents of kids under 18 reported they are “really against vaccinating” their own children, up from four per cent in 2019.
Last fall, three in 10 Canadians told Research Co. they still believe a connection exists between the MMR vaccine and autism, the lingering legacy of a fraudulent 1998 paper by British scientist Andrew Wakefield.
“Wakefield’s ascent to the pinnacle of despicableness all started with one small and staggeringly shoddy study,” Caulfield, a U of Alberta professor of law and health policy, wrote in his new book, The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters.
While Wakefield’s data-distorted study was eventually retracted, “the Wakefield zombie marches on,” Caulfield wrote. “Those pushing a particular agenda keep the study in the public eye,” he said, and the retraction, paradoxically, makes the study seem even more legitimate, because “it fits into the broader anti-vaccine idea, that Wakefield was persecuted for bravely speaking the truth.
“The fake science imparts science-y credibility, while the retraction feeds a fake narrative. Zombies are hard to kill,” Caulfield wrote.
Vaccine skepticism didn’t originate with Wakefield, he and others said. “Vaccine hesitancy and resistance has a long history in Canada,” Carstairs and her co-author, master’s student Kathryn Hughes, wrote in their paper published in Canadian Historical Review. A national anti-vaccine league formed in 1900 in opposition to compulsory smallpox shots. The modern-day anti-vax movement began in the 1980s, Carstairs and Hughes wrote, led by a “small number of people with alternative understandings of health and medicine, and by parents who believe their children were harmed by vaccination.”
“A lot of parental concern is really about the number of overall vaccines that children are receiving these days,” said Carstairs, who grew up in the 70s and 80s. The number of vaccines since “has really escalated, which, as a pro-vaccination person, I think is great,” she said in an interview with National Post.
“But I can see why for many parents they sort of feel, ‘Wow, is this getting to be too much?’ Especially when diseases like chicken pox are seen as something they might have had as children themselves, or their parents had, and don’t seem particularly serious, not thinking about the long-term consequences of shingles” or other complications, she said.
“Until recently, there wasn’t much reason for parents to be concerned about their kids getting the measles. It was declared eradicated in Canada.”
Today’s intense parenting style, which focuses on nurturing the “individuality” of each child, also “feeds against the idea that I think we should be looking at,” Carstairs said. “Which is, ‘This isn’t about your child. This is about protecting the entire population. That’s why you need to get vaccinated.'”
Many parents opposed to vaccination also harbour a sense “that maybe we’ve gone too far along a technological path, and maybe that there’s better, more natural ways of coping with illness,” Carstairs said.
Caulfield, who considers the word natural “the mother of all health halos,” said vaccine hesitancy — “a trend that is costing lives” — is being partly energized by the rise of the wellness industry and its framing of vaccines as unnatural.
“There has been this middle-ground fallacy playing out where completely absurd things about vaccines are now taken as not as absurd,” Caulfield added. “They’ve been normalized.”
The phenomenon is also being fuelled by opposition to “Big Pharma,” “big science” and “big health care,” Caulfield said.
“Science communicators have to be nimble and respond to how the public is talking about these issues,” he said. “Public institutions, researchers, clinicians and public health officials always need to listen. They need to recognize missteps. They need to look at evidence and improve. Always.
“But any misstep has now been weaponized as a justification of full-scale distrust. The reality is misinformation has created distrust.”
National Post with a file from Canadian Press
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