Vaccine skepticism a growing concern, virologist warns amid rising measles caseload

Misinformation is making it hard for Canada to reach the vaccination levels needed to prevent the spread of measles, experts say as the country deals with the largest outbreak of the disease in almost three decades.

Nationally, the country is dealing with the largest outbreak since the highly infectious disease was eradicated in 1998. Canada has recorded 1,593 confirmed and 253 probable cases this year, according to the federal government's latest monitoring report Friday — the vast majority of which are in Ontario.

Dr. Peter Hotez, an American virologist who was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work developing a low-cost, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine, said the current wave of measles cases in North America highlights the importance of educating the public about vaccine safety.

"It's become quite a significant anti-public-health force," Hotez told CBC's Information Radio during a visit to Winnipeg earlier this month.

"Where I am in Texas, we've had a lot of people needlessly lose their lives because they refuse COVID vaccines," he said.

"We're seeing now a very large measles epidemic in the same places where people needlessly died."

There have been three measles-related deaths in the U.S. so far this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hotez said vaccine skepticism has become the new normal in the States, with vaccine critics such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now in top government positions.

"I do worry that a similar movement could be underway in Alberta," and possibly Manitoba, he said.

This week, the Manitoba government expanded eligibility for the measles vaccine in parts of the province, after cases doubled in the province. Manitoba had seen 44 confirmed measles cases and four probable cases as of May 10 — the most recent data available. That includes 26 confirmed cases in May alone.

A 2022 report by the Canadian Immunization Research Network found the country's vaccination rates were about five per cent below the 95 per cent required to reach herd immunity.

Last year, an unvaccinated child died in Ontario — the first measles death in the province since 1989.

The latest federal measles monitoring report says 83 per cent of measles cases involved people who were unvaccinated, and 12 per cent had an unknown vaccination status.

Kathryn Hughes, a researcher at the University of Guelph who has looked into the history of anti-vaccine sentiment, says declining vaccination rates are behind this latest outbreak.

"It's definitely the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and information during COVID," she said. "Pre-existing anti-vaccine attitudes have just gotten stronger."

Hughes outlined in a recent study how anti-vaccine sentiment in Canada started in the early 1980s, after some jurisdictions passed laws requiring children attending schools to be fully vaccinated in the aftermath of a measles outbreak.

"This was kind of built out of multiple factors, but one of them was … intensive parenting practices that [arose] in the '70s," she said, along with environmental and alternative health movements that "emphasized this mistrust of medical doctors and public health officials and modern science as a whole."

Then in the 1990s, a widely discredited report linking vaccines to autism led to a shift in the anti-vaccine movement.

"People had children who maybe had mental or learning disabilities that arose after they were vaccinated. And it wasn't because of the vaccine. It just happened right at that time," she said.

"A lot of them talked about the fact that doctors didn't listen to them. And I think this is a common thread nowadays.… The number 1 way to deal with anti-vaccine attitudes is to take time and to listen to them."

Hughes said she found a lot of the people concerned about vaccines are not anti-science, but are not trained as scientists and so don't know how research actually works.

"You don't need to encourage the attitudes, but I think listening to them and kind of reassuring them and being, like, 'OK, I understand where you're coming from' … [is] probably the best approach," she said.

Texas virologist Hotez said countering an aggressive anti-vaccine movement by reaching out to people who have been "walled off" by misinformation will save lives.

"One of the big challenges is, you know, [in] North America … we're seeing kind of two separate societies arise," he said.

"Reaching those individuals is really complicated, as evidenced by this horrific measles epidemic that's now taken the lives of two otherwise healthy kids in West Texas, and now in the Panhandle."