In 2019-20, 86 per cent of Ontario seven-year-olds were vaccinated for measles. In 2023-24, the most recent data publicly available, just 70 per cent were.<\/p>\n
The data is even more striking\u00a0in\u00a0the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. In Hamilton, rates fell from 91 per cent to\u00a048 per cent.\u00a0In Peel Region, 78 per cent to 36 per cent.\u00a0Halton: 83 per cent to 25 per cent.<\/p>\n
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\nOntario’s measles vaccination rate appears to have cratered after the pandemic \u2014\u00a0but the data doesn’t line up with reality, public health officials say. Public Health Ontario
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Fortunately for public health officials, the numbers don’t reflect reality.<\/p>\n
Medical officers of health say it’s a data reporting issue that stems from the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 a problem\u00a0the provincial government could fix by creating an immunization registry.<\/p>\n
Such a registry would function as a way for any health-care official to upload records of vaccines they administer to a central, digital database that could then be accessed in real time by other officials.<\/p>\n
Parents would no longer have to keep track of their kids’ vaccines with the infamous yellow paper card<\/a>, and report their shots to schools and child care. Adults would no longer have to call their parents to remind them which immunizations they received as kids.<\/p>\n And everyone in the province,\u00a0not just those in\u00a0the school system, would be reliably captured by the data.<\/p>\n Public health units would\u00a0be able to access that information when responding to outbreaks, “so we can have really good data to know who may be at risk in a school or child-care setting or other place,” said\u00a0Dr. Monica Hau, Peel Region’s acting chief medical officer of health.<\/p>\n “So absolutely,\u00a0we’re very much in favour of having an immunization registry.”<\/p>\n Health minister sidesteps calls for registry\u00a0<\/p>\n Under Ontario’s\u00a0Immunization of School Pupils Act (ISPA), students must get their routine vaccinations\u00a0or have a valid exemption.<\/p>\n Since health-care providers aren’t required to report vaccines they administer to public health units, those units have to piece together data on their own.<\/p>\n So, every year, public health units look at the immunization status of all\u00a0students in their area, said Dr. Christine Navarro of Public Health Ontario. They send letters to parents of kids with missing records, asking them to update the unit. They also run catch-up clinics, set up\u00a0new immigrants\u00a0with health-care providers, translate documents and review and enter records when they do come in.<\/p>\n “So, as you can guess, this is a very resource-intensive process,” she said.<\/p>\n During the pandemic, ISPA enforcement went out the window as officials and parents\u00a0scrambled to deal with the public health emergency of a lifetime. It picked back up during the school year that ended last month, meaning thousands of kids who were vaccinated over the past few years haven’t yet been captured in the data.<\/p>\n When\u00a0ISPA\u00a0data collection is disrupted, public health essentially starts flying blind. The act also only covers kids in school, meaning data on adults, infants, preschoolers and other high-risk groups is often missed, the\u00a0Ontario Immunization Advisory Committee, which\u00a0advises Public Health Ontario on vaccinations, wrote in its 2024\u00a0call<\/a> for a vaccine registry.<\/p>\n Parents often don’t know they have to submit vaccination records for their kids, Navarro said.<\/p>\n “Some parents may think that because their health-care provider has recorded their child’s immunization information in their health record, that that information is provided to the health unit, and by and large, that is not the case,” she said.<\/p>\n Health Minister Sylvia Jones’s office sidestepped\u00a0questions about whether her government would consider creating\u00a0a vaccine registry, and whether it has studied the possibility.<\/p>\n Spokesperson Ema Popovic noted the central database where public health units record vaccinations, and the government’s work on a digital ID tool through which Ontarians will be able to access their own records, neither of which act as an immunization registry.<\/p>\n Popovic added that the government has\u00a0restored the 75\/25 split\u00a0for public health unit funding between the provincial and municipal governments \u2014 which the Ford government itself\u00a0cut in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sneak peek at new data promising<\/p>\n Health units expect to have up-to-date measles vaccination data ready by the fall, and they don’t expect to see a major shift.<\/p>\n Hamilton, which has a 48 per cent vaccination rate for seven-year-olds on paper, shared a glimpse at their updated data with The Trillium. In reality, as of June 5, 96 per cent of Hamilton students born in 2017\u00a0have had at least one dose of the measles vaccine, and 90 per cent have had two, the city’s associate medical officer of health said.<\/p>\n That’s not to say everything is perfect. Until the data is in, it’s\u00a0impossible to say exactly how much of the gap in PHO’s data is due to the rise in anti-vaccine attitudes during the pandemic.<\/p>\n The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit said it’s seen a slight increase in the number of measles exemptions this school year \u2014 between 4-4.5 per cent, compared to its pre-pandemic exemption rate of about 3\u20133.5 per cent.<\/p>\n Hamilton said its overall exemption rate this year was 3.3 per cent (4.1 per cent for seven-year-olds and\u00a01.8 per cent for 17-year-olds, compared to 2.8 per cent and 2.7 per cent, respectively, in 2018-19).<\/p>\n Peel’s rate has historically been “fairly low,” under three per cent pre-pandemic, Hau said.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We’re still waiting for that final number for this year, but we don’t anticipate it\u00a0to be dramatically different,” she said.<\/p>\n Ontario passed a ‘stress test’, but isn’t in the clear<\/p>\n Even before the pandemic, vaccination rates were less than ideal.\u00a0<\/p>\n