LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why did Canada lose its measles elimination status?
Canada lost its measles elimination status because we don't have enough nurses who speak low German. By Jen. Published on January 25, 2026. This post was originally published on November 11, 2025. I've been spending some time reworking and cleaning up the Inkhaven posts I'm most proud of and completed the process for this one today.
Chapter 2: What role do Mennonite communities play in the measles outbreak?
Today, Canada officially lost its measles elimination status. Measles was previously declared eliminated in Canada in 1998, but countries lose that status after 12 months of continuous transmission. Here are some articles about the fact that we have lost our measles elimination status. You can see some chatter on Reddit about it if you're interested here.
None of the above texts seem to me to be focused on the actual thing that caused Canada to lose its measles elimination status, which is the rampant spread of measles among Old Order religious communities, particularly the Mennonites. Mennonites are basically, like, Amish-lite.
Amish people can marry into Mennonite communities if they want a more laid-back lifestyle, but the reverse is not allowed. Similarly, Old Order Mennonites can marry into less traditional-minded Mennonite communities, but the reverse is not allowed. The Reddit comments that made this point are generally not highly upvoted, and this was certainly not a central point in any of the articles.
It is a periphery point in all of the articles above at best.
Chapter 3: How does geography influence the spread of measles in Canada?
Toronto Life is particularly egregious, framing it like so. Quote Mis- and disinformation were factors in the outcome, which are partly due to pockets around the country with low vaccination rates. End quote. This is, ironically, misinformation. True information framed in such a way to precisely give you the incorrect view of things. In this post I will make two arguments.
First, yes, it is the Mennonites that began, and are the biggest victims of, the biggest measles outbreak of the current century, and second, thinking of them as resistant to vaccination is actively harmful to the work of eliminating measles from Canada once again.
I've been following the measles outbreak closely for basically its entire duration, because I have a subscription to my local newspaper, the Waterloo Record. The writers there do frequent updates on the outbreak, often with higher quality and more detail than you get in the national papers.
Chapter 4: Why are old-order Mennonites particularly susceptible to misinformation?
This is because Waterloo region has a significant Mennonite population, so shit sometimes got real scuffed. Like, over last spring, there were fairly regular advisories about local stores we shouldn't go into or quarantine if we did because someone with measles went in. One of them was the pharmacy across the street from the university campus, so that was fun. There's an image here. Description.
Chat message from Jen about measles exposure in town with link to regional health website. There's an image here. Jen tweets. Oopsies. Was at one of these locations at the time in question.
Chapter 5: What barriers do Mennonites face in accessing healthcare?
The same user replies. Region of Waterloo self-assessment says I can keep on rocking thumbs up edited.
Heading. The Mennonite outbreak. Here is what the outbreak looks like, Canada-wide. There's an image here. Health Canada. Full offence to Health Canada. This is a terrible graphic, because if you don't look at it carefully you will think that the provinces in dark blue have approximately the same number of cases, and this is very false.
SaskSatuan has barely over 100, Alberta has almost 2,000, and Ontario has almost 2,400 cases.
Chapter 6: How can healthcare workers improve vaccination rates in Mennonite communities?
What's the deal with Ontario and Alberta? Some of it comes down to the numbers game. Those are two of our most populous provinces. But Quebec has twice the population of Alberta, and it's trucking on with only 36 cases in the entire province. The answer is that it's the Mennonites, who are overwhelmingly settled in those two provinces.
I'll be focusing on the outbreak in Ontario, because that's the part of the story I'm more familiar with. If you dig into older news pieces, the Mennonite connection is corroborated by government officials.
Previously, Moore, the chief medical officer for Ontario, shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario. End quote.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of low German language skills on health communication?
Mennonites have a social structure where, once the community reaches a certain number of families, they undergo mitosis, and half the families split off to form a new community far away.
Based on Reddit's scuttlebutt, it seems like there has recently been a daughter community that moved from southern Ontario to New Brunswick, which makes it doubly unsurprising that there were many southern Ontario attendees to the original Superspreader event. Additionally, Moore, remarked in a memo he sent out to local health bodies. Quote.
Over 90% of cases in Ontario linked to this outbreak are among unimmunised individuals. End quote. And Global News reports. Quote. in an April interview with the Canadian press, Moore reasserted that the vast majority of Ontario's cases are among people in Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities. End quote.
Chapter 8: Can Canada regain its measles elimination status, and how?
Some smaller publications have found connections in their own investigation. The London, Ontario, Free Press in March 2025, the beginning of the outbreak, linked the outbreak in West Texas to their Mennonite population, and identified that several measles exposure sites in counties that have been heavily afflicted by measles are Mennonite in nature. 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.
Scatter plot titled Measles Cases by Public Health Unit, showing case rates versus outbreak percentages.
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.
I tried to match the map outlines in Procreate by hand, which means it was done imperfectly.
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