OTTAWA — An Alberta Conservative MP said she thinks the measles outbreak in her province can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and loss of trust in vaccines due to the federal government’s lack of transparency about their risks.
“
Years after COVID, broken trust in government health directives has not been addressed for many Canadians,” Michelle Rempel Garner, formerly the party’s health critic during the pandemic, said in a lengthy social media post.
Rempel Garner said the downplaying of
“rare but serious” side effects
of COVID vaccinations by the Liberal government, led by then prime minister Justin Trudeau, spurred broader vaccine hesitancy, leading to a drop in childhood measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccinations.
“(F)or individuals already harbouring concerns about vaccines such as for MMR, the lack of initial transparency on potential side effects related to the COVID-19 vaccine — or muddled public health messaging — likely reinforced narratives that deterred their vaccine uptake,” she wrote.
One recent study found that
two-dose MMR coverage
fell by more than 10 per cent among seven-year-olds in four provinces, including Alberta, and the Yukon between 2019 and 2023.
Coverage fell to 75.6 per cent in 2023, nearly 20 points below the 95 per cent needed to maintain herd immunity.
Rempel Garner, currently the party’s immigration critic, didn’t respond to a National Post request for an interview about her claim.
Alberta hit an alarming milestone this week, with the province surpassing the U.S.
in confirmed measles cases
.
The province reported Monday that it has seen 1,314 cases since the start of March, 26 more than the count recorded across 39 states by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rempel Garner’s post said Trudeau deserves much of the blame for making vaccinations a polarizing wedge issue before the 2021 federal election.
“Trudeau dined out on using dehumanizing and politically loaded terms to describe the vaccine hesitant, including ‘anti-vaxxer’,” writes Rempel Garner.
Rempel Garner says Trudeau made even more vaccine-hesitant Canadians “dig in” when he doubled down on this rhetoric during the early 2022 convoy protests.
“The Liberal government has never issued a public apology for its vehemently hostile rhetoric toward vaccine-hesitant individuals … As a result, it has entrenched a partisan divide in society, where vaccination status is viewed as a political virtue signal rather than a public health objective to be pursued collaboratively,” she writes.
Rempel Garner also speculated that the post-COVID surge in immigration has contributed to the measles outbreak, and suggested that health authorities track the citizenship status of infected individuals.
Olivier Jacques, a professor of health policy at the University of Montreal, said the 2021 Liberal campaign’s rhetoric surrounding vaccinations could have contributed to the drop in MMR uptake.
“It might have knocked down uptake by one or two per cent, but even that one or two per cent is dangerous when it comes to herd immunity,” said Jacques.
Jacques notes that vaccination rates have dropped in a number of different countries since the pandemic,
including the U.S.
“It’s really hard to say how much of a role our politics played. Even before COVID, you had all this misinformation about vaccines that was floating around on social media and elsewhere,” said Jacques.
A spokesman for federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel didn’t address Rempel Garner’s post directly, but reiterated the importance of vaccinations.
“What we are seeing in Alberta is concerning. Vaccines are safe and they save lives. We strongly encourage people to get vaccinated,” Guillaume Bertrand wrote in an email to the National Post.
Canada has seen an alarming spike in measles infections this year, with nine in 10 cases
occurring in Ontario and Alberta
.
No deaths have been reported so far in Alberta. A measles-infected Ontario
newborn died last month
in the outbreak’s first, and thus far only, reported fatality.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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