On Thursday, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, announced that an infant born prematurely died after having contracted measles. “The infant contracted the virus before birth from their mother, who had not received the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine”, his statement read. “While measles may have been a contributing factor in both the premature birth and death, the infant also faced other serious medical complications unrelated to the virus.”
When I saw this news, I struggled to catch my breath. As a mother of two, my heart breaks for this family.
Last May, a child in Hamilton died from measles. It was the first death from measles recorded in the province since 1989.
Ontario had seven cases of measles in 2003. Since this measles outbreak began last October, more than 2,000 Ontarians have been diagnosed with the disease, 140 have been hospitalized, and nine have been admitted to intensive care.
How did we get here? I don’t want to assign blame or determine cause, but I do want to discuss two connected issues: lack of access to health care, and a badly damaged information ecosystem.
A survey released last month by the Angus Reid Institute reveals that, for the most part, Canadians still believe in the efficacy of vaccines. It suggests that nine in 10 Canadians believe vaccines “are effective at protecting the individual getting vaccinated” and say that vaccines “are effective at reducing the spread of disease in the community.”
But if we believe in the efficacy of vaccines, why aren’t we getting vaccinated? Public Health Ontario says that in the last school year, “only 70 per cent of seven-year-olds were fully vaccinated against measles,” which represented a "large decline" from rates seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I wrote last year about my own experiences with vaccines and vaccine hesitancy. While I’ve had many vaccines over my lifetime and was born in a country where vaccines greatly reduced child mortality, I started to feel hesitant when I had children of my own. Because I didn’t have a family doctor, I found support in online communities that questioned vaccines.
Misinformation on social media threatens our collective health, and if disease prevention is a collective responsibility, then blaming individuals for a complex problem is counterintuitive.
This is where our broken information ecosystem meets a lack of access to health care. It’s estimated that more than 2.5 million Ontarians are without a family doctor, as I was. Family doctors aren’t just a critical link for childhood vaccination — they’re the entry point into the health-care system. Those without one are often left to make health decisions on their own.
I think back on those days when I was hesitant. I wasn’t trying to harm anyone. I was trying to figure out how best to keep my kids safe. I believe with everything in me that’s the same for most vaccine-hesitant parents.
I got lucky. My pediatrician reassured me that if my kids were his grandkids, he would get them vaccinated. It was a small gesture, but it was what I needed then — and what I needed when I chose to continue to vaccinate my children even after my husband suffered a rare vaccine injury.
I don’t want to add to vaccine hesitancy; I want to address the elephant in the room. People might be hesitant about getting vaccines for myriad reasons. Not talking about it, or labelling them all “anti-vaxxers,” doesn’t help. It pushes people further into their corners.
So, how to encourage measles vaccination? In Ontario, most of the focus is on children. Parents are mandated (with some exemptions) to get their children vaccinated to attend public school. This legislation has been on the books since 1982. Children’s camps are considering their own vaccination policies in advance of summer.
This makes sense. But adults transmit measles, too, and not enough is being done to ensure vaccination in those Ontarians.
For starters, it can be difficult for some adults to even find their vaccination status. “Canada is unique in OECD countries in that we don’t have a national vaccination registry,” Dawn Bowdish, an immunologist and professor of medicine at McMaster University, explained to me in a recent interview on the Agenda. “In most countries, you can go online, type in your health-care number, and find what your vaccination history is. But here, if you’ve moved province or if you had some vaccines out of the country, or you don’t know what vaccines you had when you were a baby — there’s really very little you can do without a lot of conversations to try to find that information.”
The information gap when it comes to our health has knock-on effects. There is so much information available online, and too much of it is bad. We need to connect more Ontarians to properly-resourced health professionals to guide them through these stressful decisions.
In that same discussion on the Agenda, I spoke with Jill Promoli, a public health advocate, whose two-year-old child died after getting the flu. “Yes, vaccination is an individual choice but it’s not something that only affects us,” she said. “It affects literally everybody that we come into contact with and then everyone that those people are going to be in contact with too. So, we have to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to best inform people who do have those questions so that they can make the best choices for themselves. But also understanding that these are decisions that have impacts beyond their family, beyond their own close community. Because it can travel so easily.”
Donate Now