On the ground in the epicentre of Ontario’s measles outbreak | Canada Voices

Among the customers coming and going from CanaMex Groceries, a Mennonite-owned convenience store in rural Norfolk County, Ont., it’s easy to find people who’ve been touched by the largest measles outbreak in the province in nearly 30 years.

Speaking outside the store on a warm, blue-sky day in March, Aganetha Guenther, 62, says six or seven of her grandchildren recently recovered from the measles.

Another Mennonite woman, who The Globe and Mail is not naming because she has concerns about her family’s privacy, says two of her brother’s children in nearby St. Thomas are sick with the viral illness.

Inside, CanaMex’s owner, Johan Friesen, says his nieces caught the measles recently, too. Two of his children attend the Glen Meyer Old Colony School down the road, where local public-health officials issued four measles exposure notices between early February and early March.

“I’ve heard of people getting measles, but it doesn’t matter. Seems like they get them and then they go away,” Mr. Friesen said as he worked the cash register at his store, which sells tamales and Mexican hot sauce alongside pop and chips and a community newspaper in Low German, the dialect spoken by local Mennonites.

“The people here, they normally have their own remedies. That’s why we really don’t even worry about it.”

The first-hand experience of seeing children recover from the measles, as most do, has reinforced the idea among some in this community that the virus is nothing to fear – or, at least, something to fear less than the vaccine that prevents it.

Mennonites in Norfolk and the neighbouring counties of Oxford and Elgin didn’t always oppose routine childhood immunizations, and many still don’t, Mr. Friesen said. His own children are vaccinated against the measles.

The shift came with COVID-19 and the deeply divisive fights over lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates. The way authorities responded to the pandemic shattered the limited trust Mr. Friesen and his friends and family had in government, public health and the media.

“I know the people, they think different now about vaccines, and that’s everywhere,” he said. “I go all over the place, to the States, and everybody, their minds have changed since all that.”

Pandemic politics supercharged suspicion of vaccines, not just in cloistered religious communities but among people of all kinds, all around the world. In Canada, although the vast majority still vaccinate their children against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles and other infectious scourges, immunization rates have fallen enough to give the wildly contagious measles virus a fresh foothold.

The result is that Canada is in the midst of the worst year for measles since 2011, when 751 cases were diagnosed, most linked to an outbreak in Quebec.

On average, Canada has recorded just 91 measles infections annually since 1998, when the virus was deemed eliminated by health authorities because it no longer circulates here regularly.

This year, Canada has logged at least 510 cases of measles, according to the most recent provincial data. Cases have turned up in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec and Saskatchewan, but the hotbed of the resurgence is in Southern Ontario, in the small towns and farming communities on the north shore of Lake Erie, south and east of London, including Norfolk County.

Health leaders in the region have been working to diminish the toll of the outbreak, offering an early dose of the measles vaccine to babies normally too young to qualify and tightening hospital visiting rules to protect vulnerable patients.

But the number of known measles cases keeps rising.

The unimmunized

In a March 7 memo to local medical officers of health, Kieran Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, wrote that the measles outbreak in Ontario had been traced “back to an exposure at a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last fall.”

The Maritime province identified 50 cases before declaring the end of their outbreak in January.

“Over 90 per cent of cases in Ontario linked to this outbreak are among unimmunized individuals,” Dr. Moore wrote.

“Cases could spread in any unvaccinated community or population but are disproportionately affecting some Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities due to a combination of under-immunization and exposure to measles in certain areas.”

Two neighbouring public-health units, Grand Erie and Southwestern, are home to 334, or about 70 per cent, of the 470 confirmed and probable cases that Ontario officials have linked to the multijurisdictional outbreak that began last October. Those figures, which were included in Ontario’s most recent surveillance report released March 20, are expected to grow.

Since the start of 2025, Ontario has confirmed 357 measles cases (plus another 83 probable cases) – more than the 327 confirmed cases diagnosed in a similar period in Texas, a state with twice the population, although public-health officials in both jurisdictions say they believe many more cases are going unreported. An additional 43 cases have been reported in New Mexico as of March 25, near the state’s boundary with Texas.

The eruption of measles in Gaines County in West Texas garnered international attention when an unvaccinated six-year-old girl there became the first person to die of measles in the United States in a decade.

The child’s parents, a soft-spoken Mennonite couple, sat for just one video interview, posted March 17. They chose to speak with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine non-profit group that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, chaired from 2015 to 2023.

The couple, speaking in English and Low German with the aid of a translator, told the hosts they were steadfast in their opposition to the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

“We [would] absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn’t that bad, and they got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said, referring to her four other children, who recovered.

Outside of CanaMex Groceries in Norfolk County, the woman The Globe is not naming pulled up a link to the couple’s testimony on her cellphone. She had noticed people in her community affixing it to their social-media statuses.

The next day, Children’s Health Defense posted a story claiming that one of the anti-vax group’s own doctors had examined the girl’s medical records and concluded her death was due to medical error, not the measles. Officials at the Lubbock, Tex., hospital where the girl was treated pushed back, saying in a statement that “a recent video circulating online contains misleading and inaccurate claims regarding care provided at Covenant Children’s.”

Patient confidentiality laws prevented the hospital from saying more. All its leaders could do in the face of CHD’s false headlines about the perils of the measles vaccine – a shot that the World Health Organization estimates has saved 94 million lives around the globe since 1974 – was “urge members of the public with questions about measles to talk with a health care provider.”

The path of the virus

Two thousand kilometres away from West Texas, public-health officials in the Southwestern and Grand Erie Public Health Units are up against similar forces of minimization and misinformation.

Ninh Tran, the medical officer of health for Southwestern, started a recent media briefing by saying he needed to “correct an important misconception about immunity through measles infection.”

Fighting off the measles doesn’t superboost a survivor’s immune system or reduce their risk of cancer, despite what people might have heard to the contrary, he said.

Dr. Tran listed all the ways in which measles can be a treacherous disease, even if it rarely kills. It carries risks of pneumonia, brain infections and brain swelling, he said. It can cause pregnant women to miscarry or deliver early. It can spark long-term health problems including seizures, hearing loss, intellectual disability and other lasting neurological problems.

Thirty-four people in Ontario have been admitted to hospital for treatment of measles complications since the outbreak began, 32 of whom were unimmunized, including 29 children, according to the most recent Public Health Ontario report. Two required intensive care, one of them a child.

“The safest way to become immune to measles,” Dr. Tran stressed, “is through vaccination.”

Most people living in the Southwestern and Grand Erie Public Health Units follow that advice. The measles vaccination rate among seven-year-old students in both regions is significantly higher, at around 90 per cent, than the dismal provincial average just above 70 per cent, according to Public Health Ontario data for 2023-24. Experts cite 95-per-cent coverage as the threshold for keeping measles outbreaks at bay.

Local public-health leaders have been hesitant to say where, exactly, the virus has been spreading in Southwestern and Grand Erie. The units are side by side on the north shore of Lake Erie south and east of London.

Southwestern encompasses the cities of St. Thomas and Woodstock and towns such as Ingersoll, Aylmer and Tillsonburg. Immediately east of Tillsonburg is Norfolk County, an agricultural community of about 68,000 people where fruit, vegetable and ginseng growers have mostly replaced the tobacco farmers who used to dominate the area. (Tobacco pickers inspired the Stompin’ Tom Connors ditty Tillsonburg and its famous refrain, “My back still aches when I hear that word.”)

Norfolk County was part of the Haldimand-Norfolk County Public Health Unit until Jan. 1, when it merged with the old Brant County Health Unit to form Grand Erie. Officials there say all but three of the 111 measles cases diagnosed in their jurisdiction have been in people living in Norfolk County.

Grand Erie’s public list of measles exposure notices provides some clues about the path of the virus. Most cite places anyone can enter, such as emergency rooms, walk-in clinics and Tim Hortons, but there have also been multiple notices at schools in Grand Erie, two of them public schools, one a school inside a Baptist church and three of them Mennonite schools.

Walsingham Christian School, a private kindergarten to Grade 8 school that caters to Anabaptist-based Mennonites in Norfolk County, had four confirmed cases of measles this winter. Many more sick pupils stayed home out of caution, just in case their flu-like symptoms progressed to the telltale blotchy red rash of the measles, principal Martin Klassen said.

Mr. Klassen said more children at the school are vaccinated against measles than not. “It has absolutely nothing to do with our church. Our church doesn’t recommend it. Our church doesn’t speak against it,” he said. “That’s a family decision that they need to make for themselves, for their own children. And as a school, we will give the literature regarding vaccination, but we won’t push one way or another.”

The Southwestern Public Health Unit, which has recorded twice as many cases as Grand Erie, hasn’t named schools or churches in its measles exposure notices.

They prefer not to single out specific places if they can warn everyone who was present during a measles exposure through direct means such as a school contact list, according to Jaime Fletcher, Southwest’s chief nursing officer and program manager for the vaccine-preventable disease program.

However, she said there have been measles exposures at three schools in the unit’s catchment, which she declined to name for privacy reasons.

Not on the list is the school inside The Church of God in Aylmer, according to Henry Hildebrandt, a pastor who rose to prominence during the pandemic for fighting lockdown orders and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The church and school decided to close pro-actively for two weeks in March – one of which was the previously scheduled March break – as a precautionary measure because of the outbreak. They’ve had no cases of measles, he added.

The closing was a gesture of goodwill by a church trying to improve relations with the wider community, Rev. Hildebrandt said, not a capitulation to fear of the measles, a virus he considers far less dangerous than the MMR vaccine, despite decades of scientific evidence supporting its safety.

In an interview inside the church, Rev. Hildebrandt said he had been closely following the case of the Texas girl, and felt vindicated by the Children’s Health Defense report alleging it was hospital error, not the measles, that killed her.

“This is exactly, precisely the story that the media wanted,” he said of the child’s death. “This is exactly what they wanted. Since Robert Kennedy took over the health department, this is precisely what [the media] needed, and they couldn’t have had a better story for them to tell than saying a six-year-old dies of measles.”

He said he believes that the American media singled out the Mennonite community in West Texas and is concerned Canadian media will do the same during the measles outbreak in Southern Ontario.

Many of the Low German-speaking Mennonites living in Southwestern and Grand Erie were born in Mexico, part of a community with roots in the Russian Empire who first moved to the Canadian Prairies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Most lived in Manitoba until that province passed laws compelling all children to attend public schools, an imposition that spurred Mennonite leaders to seek refuge in Mexico, where the government allowed them to establish colonies, mainly in the states of Chihuahua, Campeche and Durango.

Beginning in the 1950s, thousands of people from the Mexican colonies began moving to Southern Ontario to settle and work in the region’s agricultural belt.

Marlene Epp, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Waterloo who directed the school’s Mennonite studies program, said there is no official Mennonite church position that prohibits vaccination.

But the community has a history of living peacefully apart from mainstream society, rejecting what some might consider government meddling in their deeply Christian way of life, she added.

“There’s a whole set of protocols that emerged in COVID that were highly problematic for conservative Mennonite communities,” Prof. Epp said. The closing of churches, schools and church-related social gatherings was especially anathema, as were the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, she said.

Protecting the vulnerable

Mennonites who eschew vaccines are far from alone in souring on shots during the pandemic.

One day in mid-March at the Grand Erie Public Health office in Simcoe, the largest town in Norfolk County, most parents arrived with children in tow to get them caught up on missed doses before school suspension orders took effect March 25. Ontario’s Immunization of School Pupils Act, passed in 1990, requires that all children be up to date on their routine childhood shots, regardless of whether they attend public, private or religious schools.

Others came to drop off forms they had sworn in front of a commissioner for taking affadavits to exempt their children from vaccination for philosophical or religious reasons as required by Ontario law.

Anita, who The Globe is describing by her first name because she is concerned about protecting the privacy of her son, said she sought an exemption for her six-year-old because she feared the side effects of more shots. She blamed vaccines for the child of a friend developing autism, a roundly debunked theory that has undermined vaccination campaigns for decades.

In the view of Jenni Hammond, who brought her daughter, Elsie, 7, to the clinic to get a missed shot, the real threat is from vaccine-preventable diseases such as the measles.

“I just think people need to realize the implications of not vaccinating,” she said.

Those implications are perhaps most obvious at the hospitals in Southern Ontario that have had to change their protocols to protect vulnerable patients from the measles.

Most now have signs warning people with the prerash symptoms of measles to call ahead so they can be whisked in through side doors and taken to negative-pressure rooms to contain the virus.

Many are also limiting visitors, particularly on pediatric and maternity wards, meaning new parents can’t invite groups of families and friends to greet their newborns at the hospital.

“Infants are vulnerable,” said Cindy Smart, the vice-president of patient care and chief nursing officer at Woodstock Hospital, one of several hospitals that recently enacted a limit of two essential caregivers on its maternal, child and women’s health unit.

“They have no immunity, they can’t be vaccinated, and so obviously we have to protect those little infants,” Ms. Smart said.

Public-health officials in Grand Erie and Southwestern have begun offering early MMR shots to babies between six months and one year old. They are also urging the parents of babies and toddlers who’ve only had one dose not to wait for a second, which is usually offered around the time children start school.

Ms. Fletcher of the Southwestern public-health unit said the community has been receptive to those offers. Measles vaccination levels are high, over all, in the area, she said.

“That gives us peace of mind that with vaccination, with time, with extensive case management, and then a whole lot of hard work with our health system partners, we’re going to conquer this.”

With reports from Chen Wang

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