In 1988 Canada declared measles was totally eliminated from the country. That was a happy day. But that was then; this is now. Sadly, things have changed and not for the better. And Mennonites are central to this sad tale.
First, let’s look at Ontario, then let’s look at Alberta, and then Manitoba.
In May of this year, just over a month ago, CBC’s podcast Front Burner tackled the subject of what it called “a measles epidemic in Canada.” That is pretty strong language. Is it justified?
On that show Jayme Poisson pointed out that “Measles case numbers in Ontario are higher than the total registered cases of the entire United States. As of today, it is 1,646 cases since January.” Shockingly, she pointed out that measles was spreading on a per capita basis even faster in Alberta!
Public health experts have said that unless Canada turns this around measles will again be endemic to our country. Why? Because ignorance is on the rise. She did not say that. I said that.
CBC senior health reporter Jennifer Yoon explained how things had got out of control in Canada.
Hm. Just sticking with Ontario here, what do we know about how this outbreak started and spread? Yoon then jumped right in to a Mennonite connection:
“We know that it really started in October. So there was a wedding, a Mennonite wedding, in New Brunswick. Somebody went to the wedding and then came back to Ontario, and they started spreading measles. Public health officials said they never really got it under control, and the cases that we’re seeing right now are by and large connected with that outbreak. Not all, but most of them are.”
Think about that “most” measles cases in Canada are connected to that outbreak. Poisson stepped in to make it clear that the CBC did not want to be heard blaming Mennonites. It wouldn’t do for the CBC to do that. This is what she said,
“I wanna be careful here about not blaming or unfairly singling out Mennonite communities, because, of course, we know that there are cases not in Mennonite communities. But we do know also that many of the outbreaks in the U.S. as well have been in Mennonite and other Anabaptist communities. And what do we know about why that is?”
I of course have no such limitations. Actually I do. I live here and would prefer not to be run out of town. Yoon did not want to stigmatize Mennonites:
“So what you said there about stigma is absolutely what public health officials are thinking about. We know for sure that these are communities that, um, have historic objections for vaccinations for generations. Public health officials have said that they have religious objections, they have historically low vaccination rates. But some of them have not said that these are Mennonite communities. Ontario’s top doctor, Kieran Moore, did come out at the beginning and said that these are Mennonite communities. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re Mennonite or not. If you’re unvaccinated, you’re not protected. So that’s the kind of messaging that public health has been trying to give.”
Let me say that I was brought up in a Mennonite community and attended regularly, a Mennonite church until I was 18. And I have never heard anything about the ill effects of vaccines in church. But a lot has changed since I was 18. Some Mennonites—not all—have developed some strange ideas about vaccines.
This issue came up in 2021 when there were discussions about religious freedom and Covid-19 vaccines. This astonished me. Like I said, I had never heard in our church or anywhere else that this was a religious issue.
What does religion have to do with vaccines? That’s for my next post.