As the measles outbreak grows in Alberta, some parents are feeling the strain. They’re trying to keep kids safe and navigate touchy vaccine conversations with friends and family, whether they’re pro-vaccines or not.
Jillian Carter lives in Lethbridge, where the vaccination rate for kids who were seven last year range from 47 per cent in the surrounding county to 80 per cent within the city.
Her first child is an eight-week-old infant who is too young to be vaccinated. So Carter leaves her at home when she shops for groceries, goes out less, covers her daughter’s bucket seat when she enters a building, and generally avoids meeting new people socially.
“It does make it hard to branch out into like other communities, knowing that your child’s safety is at risk when you don’t know where other people are standing [on vaccines],” she said.
“You find your people and you know your people. But it’s also something that does make you a little bit scared leaving the house with a newborn.”
Measles was once eradicated in Canada, but it came back after vaccination rates fell. In Alberta, the outbreaks started in March and have since grown to 505 cases.
The highly contagious disease causes a fever and cough, then a rash. This can normally be managed at home, but in some cases, it brings serious complications such as ear infections, pneumonia and encephalitis, which can lead to lasting brain damage.
As of this week, Alberta had one child with measles in intensive care.
CBC News stopped by a popular playground at Henderson Lake in Lethbridge recently to talk with parents about how this is affecting them and their families.
Moms just ‘don’t talk about it’
Carter’s friend Mackenzie Sailer said that since the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations around vaccines have become fraught.
“We just don’t really talk about it,” said Sailer. “It’s like the three things you don’t bring up at the dinner table, right. [Religion, politics], you can add vaccinations to the list.”
Sailer’s children are three and one years old. For her, vaccines are not black and white. She got both children their standard childhood immunizations, including measles, but not the COVID-19 vaccine.
Because it’s newer than the others, she has less confidence in it. But she also feels the tension around this conversation.
“It’s hard because we’re living in a society where there’s judgment, right? But I’ve always been very open to answering and talking about it and not judging either way.”
Studies on vaccine hesitancy suggest there are often multiple factors that shape a parent’s decision, including pressure from peers within and outside religious communities, concerns around vaccine ingredients and fear of potential side-effects.
Shannon Vandenberg, a public health nurse and University of Lethbridge professor, grew up in the Dutch Reformed Christian community in a small town in southern Alberta. She studied vaccine hesitancy while earning her master’s degree in 2013.
She also has three boys in a local school. They’re vaccinated but have classmates who aren’t, and she sees the tension.
“It can create rifts in families. I see that within my own family,” she said.
CBC News approached Vandenberg to help bring context after speaking with parents at the playground who don’t immunize.
At the park, one mother said she didn’t vaccinate her children and that no one in her friend and faith circles does because they trust God for protection. But she didn’t want to speak about it publicly.
Another parent, Caitlin Hepner, was willing to share. She’s a mother of four who said she doesn’t trust vaccines and also avoids talking about it, especially after getting hateful messages toward her kids on social media.
Why one mom became a skeptic
“I am all for natural immunity with my kids, and yeah, I just try and ease into the conversation if somebody wants to have it. Otherwise, I just, there’s no point arguing,” she said, easing into this conversation as well.
She talked about the challenges, and then shared her own story when asked. She said her mistrust started before the pandemic. Eight years ago, she got her first child vaccinated when he was one. At the time, his language was advancing well. He was even starting to say words like “backpack.”
Then, inexplicably, his speech regressed to the point where she could no longer understand him, and the regression started around the time he got the vaccine. When she brought that up with her family doctor and others, she felt they didn’t take it seriously.
“They definitely dismiss it,” she said. “They just tell me, ‘well, a lot of kids go at their own pace.'”
“I’m with my kids every single day. I know if they’re progressing or regressing; it was mother’s intuition. But you’re fighting doctors — they’re ‘educated’ as they go to school.”
Vandenberg said Hepner’s concern about side-effects or injury is not uncommon among those who hesitate to vaccinate.
One challenge is that the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps and rubella) is typically given at age one, right around the time that these kinds of regressions and developmental changes can start to appear naturally, she said.
‘Highly studied vaccine’
When something happens at the same time, it looks like one caused the other. But it could be a coincidence. Health scientists rely on studies involving a much larger population to know for sure, and she said in many large studies of children all over the world, the correlation between the MMR vaccine and developmental delays, such as autism, has been refuted.
“If you Google vaccine injury, you’re going to get all kinds of stuff,” Vandenberg said. “We know the damage that someone like Jenny McCarthy has done with the MMR vaccine, right? Claiming that it caused autism in her son. That has been refuted countless times in many large studies. But there’s still people that hold on to that.”
The most reliable information comes from analyzing multiple large studies. The Cochrane Library, a worldwide non-profit association of health scientists, published a literature review in 2020 that looked at 87 studies searching for evidence of negative side-effects from the MMR vaccine. It found no association between the MMR vaccine and cognitive delay, which would include speech regression.
That review found a very small increased risk of a fever-related seizure after vaccination. But that risk was much lower than the risk for fever-related seizures that comes with getting measles.
“This has been a very highly studied vaccine. It’s incredibly well studied and I have no doubt about its safety,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, infection disease specialist with the University of Alberta.
Having better conversations
For Hepner, she said she isn’t against Western medicine. If a woman needs a C-section, it’s amazing that a doctor can step in and save a life. But she tends to search for other options before filling a prescription.
She would like to feel her insight and participation is valued.
“They seem to think that because sometimes it’s hard to understand the medical language that we can’t figure that out … read a medical study. But we’re people who are just as qualified to learn these things,” she said.
“People are very divided due to medical choices, and I think that’s absolutely insane. It’s vaccinated versus unvaccinated,” she said. “People start to question your lack of integrity or your character or your knowledge, all based on your medical choices.”
Vandenberg believes better conversations can happen. She says public health nurses can be a good resource, especially when they take the time to listen and build trust with parents over multiple conversations.
“I found a really nice time to do this was often at the home visits, when we would go and visit moms after they had babies, in their home. We would always bring up — oh, are you planning to immunize?”
“If they said no, [then we’d say], ‘OK, tell me a little bit more about that.’ Building a relationship helps, right? They feel that they can call and the door is open.”
Getting time to build trust
But do public health nurses have time for that today?
“That’s the challenge,” said Vandenberg. “The workload has increased in public health programs; the need has increased. Have we seen the resources increase as well? I would argue not. So you’re right, we don’t always have the time.”
At the playground, Carter and Sailer said they’d like to be able to have better conversations with other parents, too.
Carter said she feels strongly that everyone should have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. But people also need good access to education, she said. Hopefully, people have a family doctor they can trust, and even ask for those studies to read if they want that.
As for Sailer, she stressed the idea of being more accepting of other views.
“I think people need to have more of an open mind on just all things,” she said.
“There’s so many people that are black and white about it, and you can’t be involved with people that don’t have the same belief system as you.… In reality, that’s not sustainable,” she said. “We’re all different, and we’re all gonna have different opinions, and that’s OK. If you have respect for everybody around you, I think the conversations would be a lot easier.”
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