Have you heard the exciting news? Something that hasn’t been seen in B.C. since 2019 is back!
Unfortunately, this is not a story about a rare bird or endangered animal making a comeback: it’s measles. Yes, measles, a disease which hasn’t been seen in B.C. in five years, is back, with at least one confirmed case in the province. It’s one of a number of cases of the disease not just Canada-wide, but around the world, and its resurgence just before spring break — when lots of families with young children will be travelling — has prompted health officials to urge parents to get their children vaccinated, even if they’re not going anywhere.
One of the reasons for this is because the measles virus is an airborne one, meaning it spreads quickly and lingers in an area, literally hanging around, for some time after the infected person has left. In a lot of cases, people who have the virus don’t know it; it can take several days for them to start to show symptoms, but they’re still infectious.
Vaccination rates for measles have dropped fairly significantly, and one of the culprits that’s being blamed is the interruption to so many people’s lives that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. With so much else going on, day-to-day interactions curtailed, travel bans, and the like, many families with young children (the measles vaccine is usually administered in two doses, when a child is about a year old and when they start school around age five) simply weren’t able, or didn’t get around, to getting their children vaccinated.
Another culprit, however, is the anti-vaccination movement, which has slowly been gaining ground over the last two decades or so but exploded at the same time COVID did. Baseless conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine began to spread, and it’s presumed that many people are now looking at all vaccines with the same suspicion, despite the fact that the measles vaccine has been around since 1963 and has proved to be both safe and effective.
I used the phrase “baseless conspiracy theories” because despite the reams of impressive-sounding “evidence” anti-vaxxers like to produce, and a few outlier medical people who should know better, the vast body of scientific and medical data built up over decades shows that vaccines are safe and effective. “But look at all the data anti-vaxxers have!” some will cry. “There must be something there!”
Well … no. There are people who sincerely believe that the Earth is flat, and they have an impressive-looking array of “evidence” to back up their claim, so does this mean they’re right and everyone else — including pilots and astronauts who have actually flown into space, photographed our round Earth, and shown us all the pictures — are wrong? Of course not. It’s the same for anti-vaxxers. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as one saying goes; as another would have it, the Devil can cite Scripture for his own purposes.
If I’m in the market for a car and the consensus of car experts is that the Ford Whatever is a good, safe vehicle, I’m going to listen to them, not to some random dude who says that Whatevers are death traps because his cousin’s friend’s uncle had one and it blew up when a cat peed on it. If I want to know about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, I’m going to listen to a trained medical professional who isn’t contradicting what 99 per cent of the world’s doctors, epidemiologists, and virologists are saying.
Sadly, enough people appear to have rejected one of the safest and most effective advances in modern medicine — vaccines — that diseases such as measles are back, like a tiresome friend who shows up on your doorstep after you thought they’d left town. There’s a meme going around on social media about wanting to “go back to the Canada I grew up in,” and I have to wonder: is this the Canada they have in mind? I do hope not.