Jenn

Quote.

A list of measles exposure sites in Grand Erie includes a church and several private Christian schools in western Norfolk County catering to old colony Mennonites, and Moore's letter confirmed the link.

End quote.

A recent Washington Post article also corroborates the link, but buries it under several paragraphs of preamble about general vaccine skepticism.

Quote.

Many large measles outbreaks in Canada have occurred in insular Mennonite communities in rural Alberta and Ontario, where some are sceptical of vaccines.

Outbreaks have also been reported in Mennonite communities in Mexico and West Texas.

End quote.

Heading.

Mennonite geography.

Public Health Ontario has infection numbers for you, broken down by geographic area, public health units.

Here's what that looks like when I plot them on a graph.

Notice that there are five units that are responsible for basically all of the cases, and you will have heard of none of them because they include zero major population centres.

There's an image here.

the most populous health units, such as Toronto, Ottawa, Halton, Hamilton, Peel, and York, all have three cases or fewer for the entire year, and a corresponding case rate of close to zero.

I admit that I do not have the temerity required to separate out Mennonites from like, generic rural dwellers, but something wonky is going on here.

The measles outbreaks are all in sparsely populated regions while the big cities, with their big suburbs, presumably where all the antivaxxers would be a carry-on basically unscathed.

To better visualize this, I am going to combine a bunch of charts together jankily.

The geographic distribution of measles, blue, population density, red, adapted from Wikipedia, and, in lime green, the settlements of Amish and Mennonite communities I found online.

There's an image here.