Certain religious and cultural groups, including Mennonite populations — where the first outbreak began on Oct. 27, 2024, after an international traveller from Thailand attended a wedding in New Brunswick and guests then returned to southwestern Ontario — and Amish populations, were disproportionately affected.

see https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-measles-outbre...

or non-paywalled version

https://web.archive.org/web/20250922034906/https://www.thegl...

or if you want to watch/listen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEU4uTK5abQ

Reading this, it's a challenge to feel empathy. Everyone deserves some degree of empathy, idiots too. Yet this topic seems so needlessly self inflicted. Maybe it's a more nuanced topic than I'm aware of, is there a strong argument against vaccination?

/s

presumably that's why peter thiel went on his spiel about the antichrist -- because he's met him, and is trying to get out in front of it

A good example if the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn for whom a gloosy booklet seems to bear a lot of responsibility [1] and this predates Covid. It's particularly interesting because certain preventable diseases can cause male infertility.

This became such a big problem that Israel had to counter this misinformation so ultra-Orthodox communities would get Covid vaccines [2].

None of this came from any form of Judaism.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/brooklyn-measles-outbre...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/988812635/how-israel-persuade...

There's way less difference between those two things than their different names imply.

Oh yeah, the spread of misinformation on the internet.

57% of drs are fake, do you think 100% the certificates are genuine?

India, contrary to what the racists believe, has a long and successful vaccination program. A country of 1.5 billion people has around a 70% MMR vaccination rate among infants. Canada's in the 80% range and dropping.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/india/healthcare/as-the-number-of-f...

One could say it is because of the spread of misinformation and that might be the proximate cause.

But if a drug addict periodically overdoses and needs naloxone, and one day a supply chain issue makes it hard to access and he dies, did the supply chain kill him or his drug addiction? Perhaps monocausal explanations are insufficient.

This is the result of a failure of public health to reach out to these religious communities in effective ways for decades.

Put another way if the overall population sees an average of 0.5 or 0.95 infections per case there’s zero chance of a huge outbreak. But odds of a case making it to a vulnerable population is wildly higher in the second case.

They never really stopped, it's been every few years since then: https://forward.com/news/417390/measles-is-hitting-ultra-ort...

The Amish are/were undervaccinated but it wasn't due to religious objections. It just seems uncommon in communities to see a dr, unless it's needed: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/ohio-amish-reconsider-va... It's also hard to get an official count (I've seen estimates below 20% vs almost 90% for non-amish communities in same state, but then you read stuff like this which suggests even the old older is above 80% https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/128... ) since these communities are grandfathered into their own healthcare systems and often exempt from the normal federal welfare systems: https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-02411.html

I'm not sure about Mennonites. One of their communities writes about it and seems to suggest only 1 of the 40 or so communities is hardliners against vaccination. But I also note this is written in a really neutral way (could be to placate government, dunno): https://www.mennoniteusa.org/measles/

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-mexican-menno...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/data-investigatio...

Just stop sanewashing this.

The claim that these the religious fundamentalist groups have nothing to do with anti-vaccine propaganda inflicted by MAHA types is disingenuous or simply poorly informed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/anti-vaccine-infl...

What you can blame RFK for (and what you should blame him for) is cutting funding to identify these possible transmission events and intercept them. This is an area where the Trump admin made severe cuts, on the back of RFK's ideological bent against the concept of infectious disease and the "government efficiency" wave. As a result, responses to outbreaks in these religious communities are much, much slower. It is not a "MAHA wave" that is causing outbreaks like this, it's the loss of funding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

This kind of messaging is why Samoa had 30% vaccination rate while nearby islands had 99% vaccination when measles infected the island later that same year.

I don’t see how you can dismiss RFKjr’s messaging. Are you claiming he has no impact on public opinion?

The messaging gets a few thousand kooks riled up, and it's been going back decades to the Wakefield study and all the random kooks who think their child got autism from a vaccine. RFK is not new. His message is marginally more popular in the US, but it is not causing a huge wave of vaccine hesitancy.

Places like Samoa have additional problems with vaccination in that the standard of care isn't that high and sometimes those errors cause people to avoid care. In the Samoa case you cited there, the inciting incident involved two kids dying due to a nurse's error which wasn't investigated. If getting a vaccine involves some risk of getting poisoned by an incompetent nurse, you might also think twice about getting a vaccine. This is very different than the RFK situation of yelling about things that don't happen (vaccines causing autism, birth defects, etc.).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-measles-statu...

Edit: after a brief search, it appears you are mistaken about the efficacy of different measles vaccines - they are all effective.

Live measles vaccines are most commonly used in the most deeply poverty-stricken regions,

where nobody is differentiating between the immunocompromised, and the rest of the line of scared people.