Dipshit morons bring measles back to Canada
Thanks, plague rats!
Measles is a horrible disease. It not only has the capacity to permanently maim or kill both you and any child you are pregnant with, but it can also essentially “reset” your immune system with “immune amnesia”, taking away all your built-up protections against other diseases and making you more likely to die from those as well.
As the World Health Organization puts it:
Before the introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 and widespread vaccination, major epidemics occurred approximately every two to three years and caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.
In 2023 that worldwide number dropped to only ~107,500 people, but WHO has the attitude that this is still too much, and is rightly working to increase vaccine uptake in countries where poverty and conflict have blocked access to healthcare. In these places, people want to vaccinate their kids, and helping them should have been the last frontier in elimination of measles.
Should have been, but isn’t.
You see, folks, Canada is a wealthy and prosperous country where vaccine uptake is so universal that in 1998, the Pan American Health Organization—the WHO’s regional office for the Americas—declared Canada to have “eliminated” measles in the general population.
Wait, “is” universal? I actually meant was universal. As of this week, Canada has had measles elimination status revoked, a judgment stemming from twelve months of sustained transmission inside Canada after last year’s outbreak. So far, Canada is the only country under PAHO with the dubious distinction of measles being endemic, but the United States is on a quick path to join us.
And with medical professionals like Dr. Isaac Bogoch pointing out that Canada now has lower measles vaccination rates than we did in 1998, it’s not a surprise that such an infectious disease is ripping through Canadians like tissue paper.
Dr. Daniel Salas at PAHO noted with criticism that despite recommendations that Canada adopt an electronic vaccine registry nationwide, only six of ten provinces joined that effort during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is fair to say that Canada is humiliating itself, especially now that the entirety of PAHO has lost measles elimination status due to our failure.
And international bodies like the PAHO or the larger WHO don’t really give a flying fuck how federalism works, or what level of government is responsible for healthcare. They expect Canada to get its shit together and vaccinate kids for deadly diseases.
So, what went wrong? Simply put, vaccination isn’t a personal choice, despite what many people think. Most vaccines are not perfectly effective, and while they do make it much less likely you will get sick, there’s still a small chance for infection. For measles specifically, the first dose provides about 85% protection and the follow-up dose takes it to “over 95% protection” according to Toronto Public Health guidelines.
In addition, when it comes to spread of a respiratory virus through the air, the higher your viral count is, the more of the virus you are breathing into the air. As such, measles vaccines don’t just prevent you from getting measles, they also make you less likely to spread measles by reducing the number of people the virus can replicate in.
The overall concept of “herd immunity” is how much of the population needs to be vaccinated against a disease to prevent community spread. And because measles is so infectious, academics have built consensus around a herd immunity threshold of roughly 90% to 95% of the population.
That means that if even just one person in every ten doesn’t get the vaccine, it could be enough to enable community spread. And it gets worse, because we’re assuming an even distribution of vaccinated people across Canada, and that is not true. Even if some parts of Canada are above the threshold, other communities being below enables spread in those places, creating viral reservoirs that could mutate measles into a new, more dangerous form.
In Ontario, last year’s outbreak was triggered by spread in the Mennonite community, which have much higher rates of refusing to vaccinate their children due to religious beliefs. Even the healthcare workers who work in the area and are aware of this vaccine refusal were struck by just how rapidly measles spread through the population, which wasn’t even close to herd immunity.
And in Alberta, former Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province and adjunct professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health Dr. James Talbot expressed his anger with Danielle Smith’s Conservative government in Alberta, saying “I think they should be embarrassed… I think they owe an apology to Albertans, to admit that we fumbled. We have the worst record in North America.”
That would actually be an understatement, though. In July, Alberta reported more measles cases than the entirety of the United States. So Dr. Talbot may not be harsh enough when calling this embarrassing, just as I may not have been harsh enough in calling this humiliating.
We have de-eradicated measles because we are fucking morons who have forgotten our history, when millions of children around the globe died in the crib from diseases we can now easily prevent with safe, cheap, and widespread vaccines.
My own family, unlike these antivaxxers, know exactly what the cost of not vaccinating your children is. I’ve frequently talked about my great-grandfather Abraham, who gives me my middle name. But I get my first name from his son, my great-uncle, who was killed by yellow fever at the tender age of two in Soviet Kazakhstan while Abraham was off fighting for the Red Army in World War 2.
There was technically a vaccine for yellow fever at the time, but it was new enough that it simply wasn’t available in any meaningful way to impoverished refugees like my Jewish family.
Millions of people have stories similar to my family, which is why we all pushed so hard in the past century to vaccinate our kids and eliminate these vicious plagues once and for all. But now, measles has returned, because of dipshit motherfuckers who withhold vaccines from their children by choice.
As far as I'm concerned, if you refuse to vaccinate your children for measles, you are committing child abuse, and your children should be taken away from you for their own safety.
No child should die of a preventable disease, and it should horrify any sane human being that a parent would choose not to protect their child when given the opportunity. We as a community have a responsibility to step in for these abusive parents, and vaccinate their children regardless of parental protest.
There is no room for personal choice in this matter. If you refuse the vaccine for yourself or your kids, you create a public health risk that must be addressed. And with measles back in Canada once more, it’s clear we’ve already provided too much leeway to these antivax morons.
Time to bring them to heel.
Religion poisons everything.