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Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow
- incomingpain 1y ago[flagged]
- altcognito 1y agoSeriously? Immigration is to blame for antivax rhetoric and influence? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/211216/dq211216d-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/211216/dq211... Stats show that immigrants have high levels of immunization.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoVaccination rates in immigrant populations is lower than native born children, but not significantly. As you noted in your link, they're generally willing to get vaccines, but many didn't have access before they immigrated. Also, the current outbreak was incubated in Mennonite communities before spreading wider. Despite living in Canada for over 100 years Mennonites are still considered immigrants by many because they are insular and different. In other words, it's a racist talking point that has enough truth to make it non-trivial to challenge, but has no actual basis.
- lern_too_spel 1y agoCanada has a mandatory immigrant medical exam for anybody applying for permanent residence or a visa of longer than 6 months. At this exam, the doctor will ask for vaccination records and prescribe missing vaccinations. It is unlikely that immigrants are contributing to this outbreak. The Mennonites in Canada aren't actual immigrants and are not subject to this mandatory exam.
- hello_moto 1y agoWhere in the article it suggested the spread due to immigration? If any, it is due to misinformation and reluctance of those communities (mentioned specifically Alberta rural, y’know, the province that has been burned with misinformation, public health scandal, crazy Premier that has been stoking Separatism while cozying with MAGA that has threatened Canada sovereignty)
- cwillu 1y agoI mean, if a lot of a certain type of Americans are immigrating to Alberta, that would explain a lot
- hello_moto 1y agoYou don’t need those type to immigrate. You just need to export the ideology which is what happened to Alberta, the Texas of Canada.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoWe all know by now that immigration is going to be cited, by certain people, as the cause of any problem. It's not worth your time to draw out the charade that it's intended to start a good faith discussion. It's better for the platform to downvote and ignore.
- wat10000 1y agoMeasles is unbelievably infectious. An unvaccinated person has a 90% chance of getting infected if exposed. The virus can survive in the air for hours. In a susceptible population, one infected person will typically infect a dozen other people or more. Changing the rate of immigration won't make a bit of difference for a disease like this. It only takes one infection in a susceptible population, and then it's game over. Unless your controls are 100% effective (including tourists and returning citizens), the only way to prevent an outbreak is for the vast majority of your people to be uninfectable. An insufficiently vaccinated population is like a can of food. It might take longer to spoil if there's a pinhole in the side versus if you just crack it open, but it will spoil if there's any breach whatsoever. So unless you propose to isolate to a degree more extreme than North Korea, blaming immigrants is just bigotry.
- thinkingkong 1y agoThe vaccination rates in some parts of Alberta are less than 30%. Per capita, Alberta has the highest incident rate. The rhetoric around vaccinations, social media, a perhaps complacency towards distant threats have all contributed to this situation. The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.
- mullingitover 1y agoThere’s, ironically, heavy overlap between the group who insist that we crack down on society’s ‘freeloaders’ and the group that freeloads on those who responsibly vaccinate.
- themafia 1y agoDo you have a source for this assertion?
- immibis 1y agoThe assertion is that political conservatives are more likely to oppose vaccination. Can the source be my own eyes?
- themafia 1y ago> Can the source be my own eyes? Sure, we just call that an anecdote, and deprecate it appropriately.
- vacuity 1y agoBoth of your comments are rather silly. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/06/partisan-differences-are-common-in-the-lessons-americans-take-away-from-covid-19/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/06/partisan-... https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/23/gop-voters-vaccines-poll-00117125 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/23/gop-voters-vaccines...
- fabian2k 1y agoCOVID provided a larger stage for the anti-vaccine people, but this has been an issue long before. In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them, making it worse. Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.
- mc32 1y agoAgreed; vaccinations save lives, lots of them. But the but we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious by being quasi-scientific and at times authoritarian about things. For example fining and threatening arrest of people alone at a beach with no one nearby during Covid, etc., as well as the obviously stupidity of six feet of separation. If something is contagious via aerosol six feet is not going to impact spread very much. Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
- Larrikin 1y agoThese sound like things someone that doesn't vaccinate their kids would say as justification
- brightball 1y agoThis sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoWhen someone comes up with a clever reason why drunk driving might be OK, I don't get in an evidence-based debate with them. It may very well be the case that they've found a scientific error in official guidelines! But if I carefully explain why the error doesn't change the baseline conclusion, they'll just find something else to fixate on. They're not looking for an increased understanding of pharmacology; they've decided that they want to drive drunk, and they're shopping for a reason why it's not shameful to inflict pointless risk on themselves and their community.
- spencerflem 1y agoI’d like to take my flu vaccine this year but in the US it’s $300 without insurance
- nozzlegear 1y agoThat seems extremely high. You can pop into any Walmart in Minnesota and get it for about $45 uninsured. At Hy-Vee (the grocery store chain), I want to say it's $25.
- hgomersall 1y agoSeriously? I just had mine for £23 at the pharmacist in the UK. I just walked in and they did it.
- spencerflem 1y agoOk tbf it was the combined flu/covid, if I wanted just flu that would be ‘only’ 150
- hgomersall 1y agoWow, that sucks. Why so expensive? COVID is more in the UK, like ~£80.
- spencerflem 1y agoHaha no clue, I was shocked as well. First time being uninsured. According to other commenters maybe there’s other stores that offer it for less. Funny thing is, same day I didn’t get the vaccine the grocery store receipt starting offering a free shot and $10 store credit with “most insurances” so I didn’t qualify lol. This sorta thing that keeps Everyone safe with herd immunity you’d really think they’d want to make as easy as possible
- gtirloni 1y agoSo actually had to double check this but in Brazil you can get the flu/covid vaccine for free at public hospitals or, which shocked me, at for-profit drugstores (for sure subsidized by the government).
- kps 1y agoThe Canadian outbreaks were driven by traditionalist Mennonites. Neither social media nor immigration (20th/21st century, anyway) were significant.
- canucker2016 1y agofrom https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/measles-death-southwestern-ontario-1.7553265 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/measles-death-southwes... "Previously, Moore shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick, and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario." for Alberta measles cases, from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/world/canada/measles-alberta-canada-vaccines.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/world/canada/measles-albe... "Most cases this year are in regions where local vaccination rates are as low as 30 percent. Those towns are home to a culturally conservative Mennonite group with ties to Mexico that has historically been less likely to accept vaccines. The group primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect spoken almost entirely by Mennonites." For Texas, https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-measles-outbreak-in-west-texas-and-beyond https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-measles-outbreak-in-we... Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine. What is known about this outbreak and the community where it’s occurring? This outbreak started in a Mennonite community in West Texas where there are low vaccination rates. Many of the children are homeschooled or attend smaller private schools, and many are unvaccinated. This is not atypical for the larger outbreaks that we’ve seen in the United States in the recent past. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 measles cases, including a large outbreak of slightly more than 900 cases in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak of 383 cases in an Amish community in Ohio. For some reason many of the mainstream media reports won't reference that the Canadian outbreaks are occurring in mainly Mennonite communities. Perhaps they're trying to avoid singling them out. Dense groups of unvaccinated people are just waiting for a biological match to be lit...
- throwaway-blaze 1y ago
- actionfromafar 1y ago[flagged]
- jwgarber 1y agoHere's the origin of the outbreak: > Public health officials say it started when an international traveller attended a wedding in New Brunswick last October. New Brunswick's outbreak ended in January, but guests at that wedding had already brought the virus to southwestern Ontario, where that province's outbreak was concentrated among closely knit Mennonite communities. International travel + spread among low-vaccination communities. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elimination-status-9.6973195?ts=1762789563203 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elim...
- buellerbueller 1y ago[flagged]
- pclmulqdq 1y agoHistorically, these outbreaks have nothing to do with "MAHA"/RFK types. It's religious fundamentalist groups that lack herd immunity (because nobody in the community is vaccinated) every time.
- truth13told 1y ago[dead]
- buellerbueller 1y agoThese religious fundamentalist groups have always existed, yet Canada and other places eliminated measles. I wonder what changed? Oh yeah, the spread of misinformation on the internet.
- truth13told 1y ago[dead]
- delaminator 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoAs someone who travels a fair amount, having seen this emerging trend I made a point of getting the measles booster I was due for earlier this year. Measles is an awful disease and the last thing I want to do is have to suffer through it or worse, be responsible for spreading it around.
- lanthissa 1y ago[flagged]
- mynegation 1y agoLet's put the blame where the blame is due: the province of Alberta.
- mig39 1y agoVaccinated Albertan here. The link states most of the outbreaks are linked to a gathering in New Brunswick, and then Southern Ontario, before eventually making its way to Alberta.
- mynegation 1y agoThank you for doing your part in collective immunity and for additional context! Also I see you are from Fort Mac - I know you have been through tough times and I hope all is well with you and the family. Alberta is responsible for a disproportionate amount of measles cases, but I would not put it on anyone else other than unvaccinated people, in Alberta or elsewhere.
- red-iron-pine 1y agothe gathering location means nothing; AB has two very large cities with lots of international ties. eventually it was going to hit AB, in the same way that someone with measles was going to arrive in Toronto or Vancouver. the measles kept happening, constantly, again and again because AB is full of anti-vax communities. the mennonites got hit hard, but they're not located in huge numbers around the province. dumb-ass anti-vaxers sure are all over the province tho.
- truth13told 1y ago[dead]
- anthem2025 1y ago[dead]
- Havoc 1y agoOnwards into the modern dark age
- excalibur 1y agoWe can't let Canada beat us. We need to step up our disease spreading game. I propose we look into the feasibility of developing reverse vaccines to overfit the immune system to specific measles variants that it's unlikely to encounter, thus reducing immunity to real infections in people who are already vaccinated. Alternatively, we could ban the sale or posession of contraceptive devices, because condoms are murder. And then watch the HIV infection rate spike, weakening immune responses and paving the way for measles to flourish.
- olivia-banks 1y agoThis is awful. I work on epidemiological simulation software for a living, and while we've been running tons of simulations on a national/statewide scale, I had no idea it was that bad in Canada.