Interesting podcast about the measles outbreaks in Alberta and Ontario. I got:
- The outbreaks are primarily among unvaccinated Mennonite communities.
- Heard immunity (thanks to vaccination) among the general population has prevented exposures from turning into infections.
- Provincial health ministries are avoiding talking about Mennonites because they want to avoid stigmatization.
- Provincial health ministries aren’t holding regular briefings for political reasons.
But it’s a podcast (and I’m too lazy to read the transcript) so maybe I got some of that stuff wrong.
Edit: Fixed the link to the transcript. Thanks @[email protected]!
Canada has an anti-vaccination problem. It’s wiiiiiild how quickly the alt-right in the US (and the big money, mainstream media, and social media amplifying them) have normalized unintelligent, selfish, anti-civilization behaviour like being anti-vaccination.
Along with the Black Lives Matter movement, people’s distrust in Chump handling the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was a big reason why the US chose Biden over Chump in 2020.
It’s wild how quickly we’re throwing out progress now. Mainstream news is a joke. CBC’s often good but any tongue-in-cheek coverage of Chump is a disservice to our country. Mainstream social media is a propaganda chamber where the oligarch-serving alt-right and foreign disinformation and division efforts work in harmony spreading similar misinformation.
The US is making moves to restrict access to COVID vaccines (while they have stopped counting bird flu outbreaks): COVID vaccines are only approved for elderly and a few others as RFK continues to reshape how Americans fight disease
The Mennonite angle interests me. I would guess their vaccination rates haven’t changed much over decades, them being very consistent in their ways and presumably less affected by recent political developments. Have their vaccination rates fallen, or were they never all that well-vaccinated but were guarded by herd immunity amongst local non-Mennonites - that acted as a fire barrier that’s increasingly breaking down
IIRC, previous CBC reporting indicated that the current Ontario outbreak is due to a bunch of people who travelled to NB for a wedding, which included guests from outside Canada, who had measles. It sounds like Mennonites are maintaining their longstanding anti-vax behaviour, but, in this case, they mixed with a population who had measles.
The implication from the podcast is that the specific measles outbreak in southern Ontario is not due to new anti-vax behaviour, but previous anti-vax behaviour that has been around for decades. I generally agree with your statement, but it sounds like that wasn’t the cause for this outbreak.
I’m saying this without any actual proof, but I strongly suspect the Mennonite outbreak is among a group of Old Colony Mennonites. Due to pressure from various governments, Old Colony Mennonites migrated from Ukraine to the Russian Empire, then to Canada (where some stayed), and then to Mexico; this left them with a cultural distrust of governments and government agencies (such as public health agencies). They settled in rural Mexico and avoided the government and public contact as much as possible, meaning that (among other things), they managed to avoid the great vaccine push of the 1950s and 1960s, whereas more mainstream communities were educated on the benefits of vaccines and got to see those benefits in their everyday lives. When Mexico’s economy deteriorated in the 1980s and 1990s, some of those Old Colony Mennonites moved to Texas and others back to Canada, where they remain in under-vaccinated pockets.
I haven’t heard anything about which specific branch of Mennonites are involved in the outbreak but, as I said, I suspect they’re mostly Old Colony Mennonites.
You probably could have saved yourself and everyone else some time by simply not commenting.