Measles and Vaccinations
NL, Canada, and the US
Newfoundland and Labrador has a special connection to vaccination and scientifically-rooted improvements in public health.
John Clinch inoculated his own family and other residents of Twillingate against smallpox starting in 1798, two years after Edward Jenner tested his first vaccine against smallpox. Clinch and Jenner were friends. Jenner sent Clinch the materials to use in the vaccination and the success of Clinch’s work appeared in a British medical journal in 1801.
Smallpox is an especially vicious disease and until Jenner figured out a vaccine, the disease scarred bodies and lives and took lives for centuries.
Meanwhile…
Some version or another of this chart started making the rounds last week. It shows the number of measles cases in the United States since 2023. CNN’s Dana Bash put a question about the outbreak to Dr. Mehmet Oz, a well-known and frequently controversial medical grifter currently serving under the anti-vaxx loon Robert Kennedy Junior. Oz veered wildly away from the question about the measles outbreak in the United States, shifting off to a defence of the preposterous attack on other vaccines.
Go back to the chart. Look at the bit on the left to see what the excitement really is. While there was an outsized growth in the total number of reported cases in 2025 compared to 2024, the 416 new cases in January alone is a wild increase that would put the 2026 total number of cases at 5,000 or more than double the year before.
There’s one cause: lack of vaccination.
And with the federal health department in the United States now run by a gaggle of anti-vaxx goons armed with nothing but misinformation and completely nutty ideas, Americans can expect to see all sorts of preventable diseases spread wildly.
There has always been a relatively small community of people who - for religious reasons - refused vaccinations and other forms of modern medical treatment. Those folks are different and their numbers are relatively constant over time.
The problem we are seeing right now in public health is folks whose beliefs are not religiously rooted but are refusing vaccinations because they believe the whole thing is a scam to enrich the vaccine makers and health care generally and/or that the vaccines themselves are poisonous or cause other diseases. Aluminum is a favourite target if the anti-vaxx mob. As recently as Monday, the Journal of the American Medical Association refuted any claim that aluminum in vaccines causes adverse health impacts.
The anti-vax lunacy at the root of the current North American spike in measles has been a thing for a long while, long before Donald Trump and his gaggle started pushing it. They actually exploited an existing grift that enriches a few and kills and maims many. Thing is, what we are seeing now in North America are not just unvaccinated children but unvaccinated children whose parents were also not vaccinated based on the same farkakteh ideas.
They may have escaped the disease as children because almost everyone was vaccinated, got some immunity through breastfeeding from their vaccinated mom, or had acquired immunity by having the disease and recovering. Now, though, their kids can catch the disease and as they get sick both unvaccinated kids and unvaccinated parents are at risk of getting sick.
Measles is not an trivial thing disease. According to the US federal government’s Centres for Disease Control,
“Hospitalization. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the U.S. who get measles is hospitalized.
“Pneumonia. As many as 1 out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
“Encephalitis. About 1 child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain). This can lead to convulsions and leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability.
“Death. Nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
“Complications during pregnancy. If you are pregnant and have not had the MMR vaccine, measles may cause birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight baby.”
Cool, eh?
Avoidable sickness including some nasty complications and avoidable health care costs all now a serious risk. You see the stupidity, right? Folks not getting vaccinated because it’s part of some conspiracy to make more money and one of the big consequences for 20% of people in the United States with measles is… avoidable health care costs that they pay out of their own pockets. There’s stupid. Then there’s anti-vax.
Of course, it’s not just measles these folks are at risk of. Add other childhood illness - measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, and chickenpox - and of course, the constant scourge, smallpox.
That last one is especially nasty because even thugh there hasn’t been a reported case in the US since 1977, there’s been no active immunization program there since 1972. Same in Canada since the disease is officially considered wiped out. You have to seek out smallpox vaccination actively, so there’s lots of folks out there with no immunity at all to smallpox.
And that’s wonderful because measles was wiped out in North America for a while as well.
That only lasted until unvaccinated people met live disease.
You can understand that in a place like the United States that has a long history of anti-intellectualism, almost obsessive individualism, and for-profit health care, it’s easy for folks to become part of a complex eco-system of ignorance of which anti-vaxxing is just one symptom.
Canada is not immune to anti-vax stupidity, though despite having a publicly funded health system for most primary health care. Since 1998, there have been a couple of major outbreaks but they involved fewer than 500 or 1,000 people. In 2025, things went crazy.
The year-to-date number shown in that Winnipeg Free Press story from July of last year wound up being 5,450 cases, according to Health Canada.
All but three provinces or territories reported no cases, with Newfoundland and Labrador being the only province to reported zero cases. The provinces with the biggest numbers were Ontario and Alberta and those were part of an outbreak that came from outside Canada to New Brunswick.
The people in Ontario who got sick were unvaccinated, hadn’t had full vaccination, or for whom there was no vaccination history. Some would be considered full vaccinated but there is always a possibility a small number of vaccinated people will still get sick and the numbers of those folks are small. The number who contracted the illness but who were reportedly fully vaccinated were between five and 17 percent of reported cases, depending on the cohort in which Ontario health reported the data. See the table below for more information.
Ontario broke down it’s reporting for the 10 years before the big outbreak and then for 2024 and 2025 between those linked to the outbreak and other sources of measles infection. Between 93% and 100% of cases were in people born in 1970 or after. Those under 19 years of age were disproportionately hit by the Big Outbreak in Ontario while in the other cases, it was split evenly between those under 19 and those older.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, we’ve been immune to the trend across the continent for immunization for childhood diseases and hence for outbreaks of preventable diseases. The vaccination rates for children under two is 95% with 92% of kindergartens having all vaccinations in 2022, the most recent year we have data for. Even if most people across Newfoundland and Labrador have never heard of Clinch, they at least act like they understand the importance of vaccination in preventing illness.
greatly appreciated the Newfoundland tie in to the story. wrapped it up
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