How Alberta Became the Epicentre of Canada’s Measles Outbreak

.main_housing p > a { text-decoration: underline !important; }

.th-hero-container.hm-post-style-6 { display: none !important; }

.text-block-underneath { color: #333; text-align: center; left: 0; right: 0; max-width: 874.75px; display: block; margin: 0 auto; } .text-block-underneath h4{ font-family: "GT Sectra"; font-size: 3rem; line-height: 3.5rem; } .text-block-underneath h2{ font-size: 0.88rem; font-weight: 900; font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; } .text-block-underneath p { text-transform: uppercase; } .text-block-underneath h3{ font-family: "Source Sans Pro"!important; font-size: 1.1875rem; font-weight: 100!important; }

.flourish-embed { width: 100%; max-width: 1292.16ppx; }

.th-content-centered .hm-header-content, #primary.content-area { width: auto; } .entry-content p, ul.related, .widget_sexy_author_bio_widget, .widget_text.widget_custom_html.widget-shortcode.area-arbitrary { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } .hitmag-full-width.th-no-sidebar #custom_html-45.widget { margin: auto; } @media only screen and (max-width: 768px) { .img-two-across-column{ flex-direction: column; } .img-two-across-imgs{ width: auto !important; max-width: 100%!important; padding:0px!important; } .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 25px !important; margin-right: 25px !important; } .text-block-underneath h4{ font-family: "GT Sectra"; font-size: 35.2px; line-height: 38.7167px; } } @media only screen and (min-width: 2100px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 32% !important; margin-right: 32% !important; } } @media only screen and (max-width: 1200px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { /* margin-left: 25px !important; margin-right: 25px !important; */ } } @media only screen and (max-width: 675px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 10% !important; margin-right: 10% !important; } } .hero-tall {display: none;} .hero-wide { display: block; } @media (max-width:700px) { .hero-wide { display: none; } .hero-tall { display: block; } } HEALTH / DECEMBER 2025 How Alberta Became the Epicentre of Canada’s Measles Outbreak A virus eradicated from Canada a generation ago just took the life of a newborn BY MONICA KIDD ART BY CORNELIA LI

Published 6:30, October 6, 2025

The sign on the door knocked the wind out of me: “There are concerns with the rising numbers in the province regarding the measles outbreak. THERE WILL BE A 2 PERSON PER PATIENT VISITING POLICY.”

I work in a labour and delivery unit in Calgary, and our floor had always prided itself on an open visitation policy. Having a baby is a huge moment in a person’s life, and patients do better with support from family and friends. The only other time we’d had to restrict visitors was during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Before long, things got so bad that our entire unit relocated to another hospital for a few months while our space was held for an anticipated surge of seriously ill people.

At the time, patients and families were scared and confused; we physicians, nurses, clerks, lab staff, and cleaners were worried and burnt out, constantly bracing for what might come next, and we were sometimes sick ourselves. Though COVID-19 administered a collective whipping, vaccination and other public health measures eventually shaped the pandemic into something manageable.

Years later, those memories remain raw, and it can still feel like we’re only just blinking into a post-pandemic dawn. Now it was measles—a disease my colleagues and I once spoke of in the past tense, declared eradicated in Canada a generation ago. And one that, just last week, took the life of a newborn baby.

I’m not the boldest of doctors when it comes to those resistant to vaccines. I state what I know to be the science. I describe the diseases vaccines are meant to prevent, the evidence of their efficacy, the low risk of side effects. If the hesitation seems about the very real burden of choice—taking an action that might cause harm versus playing the odds and hoping for the best—then I’ll share that I’m vaccinated against everything I can think of, that I’ve vaccinated my kids, and that I do it to protect my family, my patients, and my community.

I’ll always end my speech with this: “I’m not the police: it’s your choice.” I believe it’s my job to defend and improve public health, but making people angry can’t be the answer either. Harping on a point when I know someone firmly disagrees—and is unlikely to be swayed by more “education”—only risks picking a fight and pushing them further away. Which doesn’t make them any less pregnant or in need of care. If we’re serious about reducing preventable suffering among kids in this country, we’ll need to relearn how to talk across our differences.

Of course, vaccine beliefs are one thing in conversation. They are something else entirely when the consequences start to spread. Measles cases began showing up as the usual one-offs in Alberta in March. In April, when 30 and 40 then 100 cases were being diagnosed each week, memos started circulating at work about whom to screen, who required isolation, and for how long. But the memos also needed to remind health care providers what the illness looked like: flu-like symptoms followed by fever, red and watery eyes, then a blotchy red rash starting on the face and moving toward the feet.

By June, when weekly provincial cases were solidly in the triple digits, Canada’s main malpractice insurance provider reminded doctors about their obligation to discuss vaccinations with patients and guardians. By the summer, Alberta was reporting roughly twice as many cases per capita as the much more populous Ontario, and it had more confirmed measles cases than the entire United States. Then came the new Alberta Health Services visitation guideline that only two visitors would be allowed in certain high-risk areas of the hospital, including neonatal and pediatric intensive care units and oncology floors.

In the spring and summer, I talked to worried parents of newborns. Measles is airborne, so even without direct contact, an unvaccinated person can contract the virus. A baby with measles can develop pneumonia or swelling of the brain, leading to brain injury, deafness, or even death.

The questions piled up quickly. While there was a safety net—treatment within six days of exposure could lower the chance of illness—most parents wanted to minimize the danger outright. They wondered whether it was safe for family to drop by. Could they take their babies to public places? Was it okay to visit extended family? Kids in Canada are routinely offered two doses of measles vaccination, at twelve and eighteen months, but they can get a first needle as early as six months if travelling to a measles-endemic area; I “joked” with parents that might now include the neighbourhood grocery store.

And the pace of their questions matched that of the outbreak itself. In just four months, what had started as isolated cases turned into a province-wide tire fire.

It’s September as I write this, and while my work looking after people during the Alberta measles outbreak has so far been tame—counselling patients about exposure risks—Jaime Blackwood’s world has looked very different. She spoke to me by Zoom after a shift in the pediatric intensive care unit at Alberta Children’s Hospital, in Calgary, one day late in August.

ACH receives referrals from southern Alberta, southeastern British Columbia, and southwestern Saskatchewan. She remembers measles “arriving with a bang” at her department: almost every shift, at least one community physician called for help managing a sick child or arranging hospital transfers for specialized care.

Blackwood had been doing ICU-duty for sixteen years and had never seen measles in person. Maybe one of her colleagues had, but that would have been back in the day—and was this virus even the same as what people had experienced in the ’70s and ’80s? After all, viruses evolve. Could it be more contagious now? Have different effects on the body? Could it be more deadly? In addition to infected kids, she also worried about pregnant colleagues travelling to pick them up. The risk of death from measles is ten times higher for pregnant people, and infections in the last two weeks of pregnancy can mean a baby is born with the disease. Would their own protective equipment and vaccines hold?

It was uncharted territory, and she was now in it. “Sitting at the bedside,” she says, “having intubated a kid who has measles pneumonia, and just watching because you don’t really know how that next minute is going to go. And not being able to anticipate, because it’s something you’ve never seen before, just read about in a textbook.”

Of course, not every kid who contracted measles ended up in the ICU, but if Blackwood saw them, they were the sickest of the sick. She says it took a team effort with infectious diseases doctors to come up with treatment protocols, essentially on the fly. Measles has been so rare in North America for decades that existing management approaches are outdated. Some kids ended up on a ventilator, with “lines going everywhere,” she says. Even when they didn’t need breathing support, they were some of the most inconsolable children Blackwood ever cared for. “They were covered in rash from head to toe, and they had these big red eyes.”

Most of the kids Blackwood has looked after are preschoolers, and all have been unvaccinated. How, you might ask. In many parts of Canada, including Alberta, routine childhood vaccinations are not required for someone to take part in public life. New Brunswick and Ontario require proof of vaccination—with certain exemptions—for school entry; other regions can insist unvaccinated children stay at home during outbreaks. Alberta offers voluntary childhood vaccinations at school, but immunization is not required for attendance.

Still, parents will sometimes ask if anything could have been done to prevent their child from becoming sick with measles. Or, worse, share that they wish they had been “allowed” to vaccinate; some community members could be putting enough pressure on parents that they feel they don’t have freedom to choose.

“Almost everyone I work with is so thankful to have the medical team looking after their kids,” Blackwood says. “They’re grateful and they’re kind. But more than ever before, there’s a feeling that someone on the internet knows better. I did fourteen years of training to try to save kids’ lives, then to have to explain that I’m using the best medical scientific information we have? I’m just sad about the distrust, and it seems to be getting worse.”

On October 2, Adriana LaGrange, Alberta’s minister of primary and preventative health, reported the province’s first death from measles: a woman had contracted it during pregnancy; her baby was born prematurely and died shortly thereafter. No details were provided about the mother’s vaccination status, where she lived, or even when the death occurred.

Blackwood is worried about what’s in store in the back-to-school period. Will we have a repeat of last winter’s viral trifecta of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and COVID-19 plus measles competing for limited hospital resources?

She honestly wonders what doctors can do to regain people’s trust. “These parents love their kids, and they’re heartbroken to see them having life-threatening troubles.”

That a few measles cases showed up in Alberta this March was not alarming in itself. Canada authorized a live measles vaccine in 1963 and rolled out a universal immunization program in 1983. Pre-vaccine, the average number of people in the country being diagnosed with measles over five years was just over 50,000; by late 2010, that number dropped to twenty-nine.

By 1998, vaccination rates were already high enough that Canada declared measles eliminated, meaning the virus could still be brought in from abroad but no longer spread within our borders. That happened because a strong majority of people here were immune: when more than 85 percent of people are vaccinated, community-level outbreaks can typically be controlled; if more than 95 percent are vaccinated, few if any measles outbreaks will happen at all.

But over time, vaccination rates began dropping. In 2015, 87 percent of kids in Alberta had received their first dose of the measles vaccine by age two, and 81 percent had received their second dose by age seven; by 2024, those numbers had dropped to 80 and 72 percent respectively—well below the so-called herd immunity rate.

That Alberta’s vaccine uptake reportedly remains among the lowest in Canada is not surprising. The province has become a case study in declining trust in science at the highest levels. Alberta was a hotspot for resistance to vaccines and public health restrictions during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Church services, rodeos, and protests were common here. In July 2021, Health Canada reported that 60 percent of Albertans had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The province was tied with Saskatchewan for second lowest rate in the country, ahead of only Nunavut’s 53 percent; Newfoundland and Labrador led the pack with 73 percent.

Some of those resisting vaccinations were physicians. The importance of immunization is Med School 101, but doctors are people too. They vote across the political spectrum and will have different ways of interpreting the literature. There will always be doubters.

For a time, unvaccinated health care providers were not allowed to work, and in 2021, four Alberta doctors—Eric Payne, Joanna Moser, Gregory Keen-Wai Chan, and David Loewen—filed a statement of claim against Alberta Health Services, claiming they were “being held up to public opprobrium, ridicule, hatred, maltreatment, discrimination, detestation, contempt, enmity, extreme ill-will, denigration, abuse, or delegitimization on the basis of their vaccine status.” Later that year, an Alberta judge dismissed an application from four other doctors—Nadr Jomha, Blaine Achen, Gert Grobler, and Tyler May—who sought to be exempt from the AHS vaccine mandate. The mandate was eventually lifted in March 2022.

That decision came on the heels of a tense uprising in Alberta. On January 29, protesters in the border town of Coutts shut down the Canada–US crossing for a little over two weeks, in part because of COVID-19 restrictions. Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were later sentenced to prison time for firearms offences and mischief over $5,000; they were not convicted on the more serious charges of conspiracy to commit murder of police officers. In 2023, United Conservative Party premier Danielle Smith came under review by Alberta’s ethics commissioner for suggesting to another protester involved in the border blockade that she might be able to make some of the charges “go away.”

This was after the premier had convened a $2 million task force to review provincial COVID-19 data with a view to offering recommendations for how to manage future pandemics. The final Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force report, released in January, called on the province to immediately stop administering all COVID-19 vaccines not accompanied by a “full disclosure” of potential risks (disclosure is already routine practice) and to stop healthy children and youth from receiving them—period. Instead, it argued in favour of medically unproven treatments such as the antiparasitic ivermectin, famously championed in 2020 by US right-wing media personalities, fringe physicians, senators, and influencers. The Alberta Medical Association shot back against the government’s report, calling it “anti-science.”

While not all of the report’s advice has been adopted—thankfully, doctors are not being pressed to prescribe ivermectin—the recommendations have influenced policy. In August, citing concerns over 400,000 unused COVID-19 vaccine doses from the previous year, the province announced it would charge most Albertans a $100 fee for a booster; exceptions included health care workers, people who are immunocompromised, and—fortunately for my patients—pregnant people. Critics of the move, such as former Alberta chief medical officer of health James Talbot, worry it erects further barriers to vaccination and makes this province an outlier in its approach to public health.

“Outlier” is one way to put it. “Rogue” is another. Or better: reckless.

• RFK Jr. Is Bad for Canada’s Health Too
• You’re Not Imagining It. Health Misinformation Is Everywhere
• The Trade War Poses a Threat to Canadian Health Care

Craig Jenne had a sense of what he might be getting himself into the evening of Tuesday, March 4.

Jenne, an immunologist and vaccine researcher at the University of Calgary, was preparing to speak at a public event on health misinformation. Just a month earlier, he and nearly seventy colleagues had published an open letter to the premier, urging the government to reject the task force’s findings. The province had embraced the report, but Jenne quickly found examples that undermined its credibility. Data on ivermectin’s efficacy, for instance, came from a preprint—a manuscript posted online before peer review—that was later published and then retracted. Another citation didn’t point to research but to a YouTube video of the preprint author describing his work.

The night before Jenne’s town hall, UCP member Eric Bouchard hosted a separate anti-vaccination public meeting, called “Injection of Truth: Healing Humanity,” where, according to Jenne, attendees referred to vaccine promoters as baby killers, demanding to know “where the dead children were.” So when many of the same people—including members of the Take Back Alberta movement—showed up the next day wearing matching blue trucker hats reminiscent of the “Make America Great Again” caps, Jenne felt uncomfortable.

“They would stand up when someone would say vaccines save lives or vaccines are safe,” Jenne says. “MLAs were there, standing and jeering.” At the end of the meeting, people began crowding the stage. Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta and noted vaccine advocate (and The Walrus contributor), was escorted to his car by two security guards, while Jenne and a University of Calgary law colleague waited things out in the loading dock, Jenne says.

It wasn’t his first rodeo as a public-facing vaccine advocate in Alberta. He’s done something like 1,300 media interviews about infectious diseases over his more than a decade-long career as a professor at the university. During COVID-19, someone emailed to say they knew where his kids went to school, and that if he did any more interviews, his kids wouldn’t come home. The dean of medicine offered security, and Calgary Police Services said they could station a car in front of his house. In the end, the person was identified as a “keyboard crusader”: somebody who made threats online but rarely acted on them. Things went on as usual, although for a few weeks, the kids weren’t allowed to answer the door without an adult. He says he’s lost track of the number of times someone has sent a bogus tip to the Hague (yes, the International Criminal Court) about him committing crimes against humanity by advocating for vaccines for children.

Jenne seems to shake it all off. “None of it has ever materialized as anything physically confrontational,” he says. “But there’s a degree of stress.”

How on this wide green earth, I asked him one day, did we ever get to the point in Alberta where talking about vaccines can mean risking the safety of your family? Several reasons, he says. Vaccines became both political and partisan. In Alberta, the chief medical officer of health reports directly to the government and can be muzzled, whereas in other provinces, the MOHs operate at arm’s length from the government. The COVID-19 vaccine also came to represent Ottawa Liberals—which typically makes Alberta ride in the opposite direction.

“I remember quite clearly when Jason Kenney did his ‘Best Summer Ever,’” Jenne says, referring to the slogan the former premier used when he lifted most COVID-19 restrictions. It was July 2021 and then federal health minister Patty Hajdu blasted the move, echoing the Canadian Paediatric Society’s warning that it was an “unnecessary and risky gamble.” Kenney replied that he wouldn’t “take lectures” from Hajdu. “He did that so we could open for Stampede,” says Jenne. “By September, we had closed the schools again.”

So is the declining trend in measles vaccination linked to what happened here with COVID-19? Jenne says: “Absolutely.” But it started even before that, with fraudulent research, published almost thirty years ago, falsely linking measles vaccination with autism. (The paper was quickly retracted and the author stripped of his medical licence, yet medicine may never quite exorcise the doubts the bunk science instilled in parents.)

And there are structural issues, he says, like lack of access to a trusted family doctor. He knows the last thing a parent wants to do is to inflict harm on their kid, and a little reassurance from a trusted source can go a long way. “Someone who’s going to cut through social group conversations and say, ‘No, none of that is right. We know it works, we know it’s safe. Shut up and get your damn shot.’”

The day after my conversation with Jenne brought the first bit of good measles news we’d had in months: new cases had been trending downward since peaking in July. But we weren’t in the clear yet. If anything, we needed to prepare for a new wave as children returned to classrooms. Then there were the possible ongoing effects for the 1,826 who’d already had measles. The virus is known to reduce general immunity, so Jenne says, post-measles, kids might have to battle again with illnesses they thought they were protected against.

The thing about viruses is they punish complacency; the costs always surface. I wondered when we would begin to see evidence of complications: the premature births and pregnancy losses, the preschoolers who’d lost their hearing or worse, outcomes that might move a vaccine-hesitant person off the fence. With numbers like ours, these things had to be happening. Then came the moment that made devastatingly clear what was at stake—the loss of a baby to a disease believed long gone from this country’s story. No family should ever have to bear that.

While we can hope this will be the first and last death from measles during this outbreak—newborn or otherwise—the disease has likely spread too far, through a population too poorly protected, for us to believe we’d be getting away with that. In the meantime, lives continue to be upended in big ways and small. Visitation restrictions remain. Recently, I admitted a labouring patient about to have her baby. Beside her was an empty chair where her partner had just been sitting. Her parents had come to Canada for the birth of their first grandchild, and he’d had to drive them home because they weren’t allowed in.

It was a simple scene but one that made clear measles has the power to reorder our lives in ways we can’t always tally on a chart.