Published on January 25, 2026 6:33 PM GMT

This post was originally published on November 11th, 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.

 

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 the fact that we have lost our measles elimination status: CBC, BBC, New York Times, Toronto Life. You can see some chatter on Reddit about it if you're interested here.

None of the above texts seemed 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 traditionally-minded Mennonite communities, but the reverse is not allowed.)

The Reddit comments that made this point are generally not highly upvoted^[1], 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. Toronto Life is particularly egregious, framing it like so:

"mis- and disinformation were factors in the outcome, which are partly due to pockets around the country with low vaccination rates."

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. 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.

The Mennonite Outbreak

Here is what the outbreak looks like, Canada-wide: 

Full offense 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. Sasksatchewan has barely over a hundred, Alberta has almost 2000, and Ontario has almost 2400 cases.

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.^[2]

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.

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 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:

Over 90% of cases in Ontario linked to this outbreak are among unimmunized individuals. Cases could spread in any unvaccinated community or population but are disproportionately affecting some Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities due to a combination of under-immunization and exposure to measles in certain areas.

And Global News reports:

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 anti-vaxxers would be) 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.^[3]

Okay, sorry, you will need to stare at it for a bit. The key takeaway is that the blue areas (which represents measles cases) almost perfectly avoids the most populated areas (red), and are full of green dots (where the Mennonite and Amish settlements are).

Let's look at this another way. Here's a Public Health Ontario COVID report from April 2022 (i.e. after vaccinations have been available for a while). Pages 8-10 include comparable charts on cases per 100,000 people broken down by Public Health Unit. It's relatively stable between PHUs, and larger in city centres compared to rural settlements. This makes sense, because urban settlements are by definition denser, which means it's easier for viruses to spread.

Here are the outbreaks plotted against each other, if you're curious.^[4] Notice that the same five public health units no one has heard of are outliers again, which is what you would expect.

Also note the different degrees of variance in cases per 100,000 people in a health unit. COVID cases per 100k ranged from about 4,000 to 11,600 across health units, which is roughly a 3x difference. The Measles cases were actually incredibly discontinuous across units: many units had literally zero cases, some had under 30 cases per 100,000 people, then there's a huge gap, and then there's five regions that had over 100 cases per 100,000 people.

For the statistically inclined, the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by mean, expressed as a percentage) was about 25% for COVID and 193% for measles, which is almost eight times higher.^[5] (If these numbers mean nothing to you, don't worry about it. The point is just that COVID spread relatively evenly and measles did not.)

Lastly, here is some incidental info from some July 2025 coverage on the outbreak in St. Thomas (a smaller city, in that vertical belt of green dots across central southern Ontario, in the PHU Southwestern Public Health which is the one with the most cases):

Five months later, around 150 to 200 of our [Mennonite] clients have had measles, and most of our Low German–speaking clients have at least had symptoms.

As of October 28, there has been 771 cases of measles in the Southwestern PHU. If 150-200 of them were Low German-speaking mennonites as of July, and most of their clients had symptoms at that time, this indicates that the Mennonites would have made up for a substantial amount of all cases in that PHU.

I rest my case! Which is not to say that it is a perfect one but here is where I put it down because I am not going to put more effort into it. I encourage others to pick it up and put more work into it if they are so inclined.

Mennonites Are Susceptible To Facts and Logic, When Presented In Low German

The general sentiment both in the reddit comments and in most of the news coverage seems to be something like "oh, they're weird religious people, and therefore immune to logic about vaccines", and also something something religious tolerance meaning that we can't criticize their choices at all.^[6]

But in reality, Mennonite parents love their children and do not want them to die of measles, and they do not want to contract measles themselves. Having looked into it, it seems to me like the largest barrier for them getting medical care and vaccination is that they are not fluent in English, they speak Low German.

In Ontario, three quarters(!!!!!!) of the 700 Mennonite community clients helped by a Low German-speaking personal support worker have agreed to be vaccinated.

In Alberta (the other large Mennonite population centre, and not coincidentally the other large site of the outbreak), there has been a 25% increase in demand for medical care in Low-German, and service has expanded from five to seven days a week.

And, like, yes, to be clear, there are loads of Mennonites who are actually anti-vaccine. I am not disputing the obvious fact that, in religious communities, many people are against vaccinations. Further, 75% still falls very short of the 92-94% vaccination rate needed for herd immunity. But a 75% vaccination rate is much, much higher than I'd have hoped for?

Here is an example of the miscommunication that can happen when one is not fluent in English:

The following morning, the [Mennonite] mother called me: her child [who recently developed a measles rash] was coughing so violently she was vomiting. I told her to go to the hospital. Later, she called me again, upset. She said that when she got to the ER, they’d told her to go home. 

I couldn’t help but think something was off. The hospital doesn’t turn people away, I told her, but she insisted that they had. So I called them directly to figure out what had happened. It turned out there had been a miscommunication. Hospital staff had told her not to come in, using a “stop” hand gesture to communicate, and she had become so flustered that she failed to catch the second part of the message: that she should wait in the car while they prepared a negative-pressure room.

If your measles outbreak comes from this sort of community, the solution isn't to fearmonger about anti-vaxxers. It is to train up and hire health care workers who can speak Low German. And to be clear, I think the PHUs that are affected are doing this, or at least the Ontario ones are, because our public health bodies are generally not disconnected from reality.

And that's what I found most frustrating about the media coverage. It obscures something that's genuinely very hopeful and turns it into another random culture war shitfest. But actually, it turns out that when you remove the actual language and access barriers, people make reasonable healthcare decisions for their families at pretty high rates!

So yes, Canada lost its measles elimination status today. But we can get it back in a year and a bit, if we're serious. And if we're serious about eliminating measles again, we need to focus more on investing in healthcare workers who speak the language of and can build relationships in communities, and less on implying that certain populations are fundamentally unreachable.

1. ^{^}

   This was more true in November, a few comments who made this claim have now been highly upvoted.

2. ^{^}

   There is a trend in the media to avoid naming specific demographics when they are disproportionately involved in bad things. I don't know enough about the soundness of the philosophy behind it to feel like I can comfortably decree "and this is bad", but just for my information diet purposes, it is extremely annoying.

3. ^{^}

   These online sources are sparse for the obvious reason, and are likely somewhat outdated.

4. ^{^}

   There was a health unit merger between 2022 and 2025 so I merged the data in the following ways for cross-comparison:

   • Northeastern public health uses the sum of the total cases and the average of the cases per 100k from Porcupine Health Unit and Timiskaming Health Unit
   • Lakelands Public Health Unit uses the sum of the total cases and the average of the cases per 100k from Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit and Peterborough County-City Health Unit
   • South East Health Unit uses the sum of the total cases and the average of the cases per 100k for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties Health Unit, Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Health Unit and Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District Health Unit
   • Brant and Lakelands PHUs removed because of incompatible/incomplete data
   • Grand Erie PHU uses only data from Haldimand-Norfolk PHU because of aforementioned Brant PHU removal
5. ^{^}

   Claude ran the numbers for me:

   Measles outbreak case rate per 100,000 measles = [127.8, 164.3, 0.2, 0, 2.7, 101.4, 28.7, 0.6, 0.3, 190.2, 14.8, 9.9, 2.5, 28.5, 17, 0, 0.3, 0.1, 20.9, 16.4, 2.7, 0.2, 13.6, 325.3, 0, 0.1, 21.1, 33.3, 0.2]

   COVID cumulative rate per 100,000 covid = [6707.4, 7747.1, 9581, 8451.9, 7134.7, 6943.7, 4747.7, 4669, 7767.3, 4783.8, 8589.8, 7198.7, 8199.9, 4256.5, 6678, 9671.7, 6840.5, 11594.5, 6979.1, 7440.3, 4056.3, 7218.1, 6000.87, 6056, 7068.2, 10361.8, 6874.5, 9856, 8971]

   Measles (n=29): Mean: 38.73 Std Dev: 74.84 CV: 193.2%

   COVID (n=29): Mean: 7325.70 Std Dev: 1855.83 CV: 25.3%

   Ratio of CVs: 7.6x

6. ^{^}

   We love the Mennonites here the way Americans love the Amish. It's fun, in a way, to dunk on suburban moms, but if you bring up the fact that Mennonites beat their wives and abuse their children it really kills the vibe of the party. I have a huge axe to grind about this, but despite that I do not think it is good for them to die of measles.

Discuss

Recently, I walked into my doctor’s office and receive my first dose of the HPV vaccine at 24. I felt a bit ridiculous sitting in the waiting room, a third-year medical student who can discuss the mechanism of E6/E7 over-expression but never got the vaccine that prevents it. 

I grew up in New Jersey with excellent health care access. My parents never skipped a checkup or a vaccine. But when I asked them recently if they had ever discussed the HPV shot at my pediatrician’s office, they didn’t know what I was even talking about. To our knowledge, it never came up at an annual visit with my primary care doctor. Not at 11, the recommended age, or even 13 or 15.

Read the rest…

Seeing infectious disease patients at a North Carolina hospital on Christmas Day 2025 could easily make a doctor cynical.

In recent months, I walked through the Raleigh airport where a patient with measles travelled a few days before. I have watched research colleagues wind down promising work on adolescent HIV because of  funding priorities shifted. I see patients in communities where the nearest rural hospital operates one bad quarter away from closure, and where families quietly ask social workers whether food assistance will still be there next month. These are the same patients that I saw over the holiday period this year at UNC Health in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Read the rest…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and an assortment of other masked Federal officers are arresting U.S. citizens for not showing ID or “proof” of citizenship on the streets, at traffic stops, and in warrantless door-to-door searches in the Twin Cities. ICE is planning to station agents to “check documents” on the jetbridges at the […]

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This week’s question comes to us from Gwen Dubois:

How do I keep functioning in a capitalist world?

I am going to tell you a very shameful story.

Erika got me a Kit Kat clock for Christmas. For those who are unaware, a Kit Kat clock is shaped like a cat, with a clock in its belly, and eyes and a tail that go back and forth like a metronome. I’m sure you’ve seen one. They go back to the deco age of the 1930s, and if you’ve ever dated someone with bangs they have one in their kitchen. They’re usually black. Erika got me a kelly green one. (Go birds. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine.) I was very happy to get it.

On Christmas night, after friends and family had all left, I decided to hang up my Kit Kat clock. I rummaged through the junk drawer (I’m kidding, they’re all junk drawers.) until I found two C batteries, inserted them in the clock, then hung it up. The eyes and tail weren’t moving. I gave the tail a little push. Nothing. Hmm. I took it down and checked the batteries, which had expired in… 2018. Batteries expire? I decided to deal with it tomorrow. The next day I walked up to my local ma and pa drugstore (I’m kidding, it’s a fucking CVS) and bought a fresh pack of C batteries. I went home, put in the new batteries, put the clock back on the wall, and… nothing. Gave the tail a little push, and… nothing. This time I decided to see if the clock itself was working. I checked the time, came back 30 minutes later, and… the clock was working. This most likely eliminated the batteries as the source of the problem. By this point Erika was on the internet doing what she does best, research.

Readers, there are a lot of videos out there on fixing Kit Kat clocks.

We tried a few different things and none of them worked. Finally, we found a video that told us the most likely culprit was that the magnets used in the clock to make the eyes and tail move probably weren’t strong enough but could be easily fixed by adding more magnets to the clock. I was into this solution for two reasons: magnets and a reason to go to the hardware store, which I love. So off I went to the local hardware store.

“Do you have 8mm by 1mm neodymium magnets?” (The video was very specific.)

“All we have is what’s in the case.”

They weren’t in the case. No biggie, there’s another hardware store five blocks away, and it was a nice day for a walk. Sadly that store didn’t have 8mm by 1mm neodymium magnets either.

(Fun medical fact! Neodymium magnets come with very large warnings about keeping them away from children and idiotic adults who will think it’s funny to swallow them, except that they’re so strong they’ll get stuck in different parts of your colon and accordion your colon when they attract each other, as magnets do. The results aren’t good, but on the upside the surgery is incredibly expensive.)

Having struck out at the two local hardware stores I could walk to, I decided to wait a few days and go to the even bigger, but still locally run, hardware store by work. (Shout-out to Center Hardware!) Which I did. They had an extensive supply of magnets, neodymium and otherwise (No, I don’t know what the difference is.), but unfortunately, not the specific size I needed.

Here comes the shameful part. At this point I was so frustrated that I opened the Amazon app on my phone and ordered 8mm by 1mm neodymium magnets, which of course they had. A couple days later a shame-filled envelope showed up at my door with one hundred 8mm by 1mm neodymium magnets inside. (I need two.) And, yes, I realize I hadn’t exhausted all other options, including other online options, before resorting to Amazon. But I let frustration get to me and took the easy way out.

None of this specifically answers your question, but it’s related and I needed to get it off my chest. Still, I feel like I at least tried to buy these magnets at three local stores before letting frustration get the better of me. And what I’m maybe saying is that it’s sometimes hard to use the system differently than it's been designed to work. Because at this point, the system is definitely designed to get me to go to Amazon first.

A few days ago I was sitting in the local dogpark when the ever-popular topic of San Francisco’s downtown came up. Apparently another big store had shuttered. And the Old Men of the Dogpark™had much to say about “the state of things” including crime sprees and other make-believe bullshit that was keeping people from doing their shopping downtown. As they’re saying this I’m watching various Amazon trucks circle the park. Finally I asked one of them when he’d last bought something at Amazon.

“Last night.”

“Where would you have bought that before Amazon?”

“Downtown.”
Three things are happening here: our options are disappearing, we’re being sold a bullshit narrative about why our options are disappearing, and the evil alternative—which isn’t an alternative at all because it’s killing all its competition—feels incredibly easy. Because it is. You open your phone. Every item you could ever want is there. You push a button. It comes to you. Your city dies.

I’m gonna turn into an old man for just a minute. There was a time, not that long ago actually, when I could’ve walked four blocks to a Radio Shack and said “You got magnets?” And they would’ve showed me a wall of magnets. Then, just to rub it in, I could’ve stopped next door at Tower Records and spent an hour looking at magazines before picking out a record and walking back home. And I honestly miss doing shit like that, but I realize that these are part of my past, and trying to convince people that my past was better than their present is incredibly annoying, doesn’t solve shit, and is deserving of all the eye-rolls you are now giving me. And yet… Radio Shack was fucking glorious. Rant over.

So how do we function within capitalism?

I lied. Rant not over. Not quite. Because the lesson we can take from how “things used to be” is that we used to have options. The endgame of surveillance capitalism is to take away as many options as possible, which sounds to me a lot like a company store. Where your dollar can only go to the one place that provides the thing you need, at the one price it costs, at the one quality it’s offered. And honestly, if I were to look outside and see a lot of joy and happiness and people enjoying their one life here on Earth I’d be inclined to say “Good job, here’s my dollar!” But that’s not what I see.

Half my neighbors are afraid of being shot in the face by the government, and the other half are providing that same government with their own surveillance data by covering their homes in nest cams inside and out. Orwell fucking wept.

Unfortunately, capitalism is here and will probably remain here for the foreseeable future. Even if we, hopefully, start adopting some of the tenets of socialism, we will be interweaving it with capitalism. Which means we need to be more intentional about where we put our dollar, and we need to be aware of what we’re actually trading for our dollar.

Once upon a time (here he goes again), if I went to the hardware store and bought a light bulb that is exactly what I got. A light bulb. Depending on the hardware store my purchase might trigger a subtraction to their inventory database, and if they were really fancy, there might be a record that I bought a light bulb which might could be useful in a few years if I were to go back, be confused, and ask them if they knew what kind of light bulbs I’d bought last time. But for the most part, me walking out with a pack of light bulbs was the end of the transaction. These days, a light bulb purchase is the beginning of a transaction. You screw in the lightbulb, you fire up your lightbulb app, you set up a scenario, you get the light bulb to talk to your phone, you make it behave depending on your phone’s distance to it, or the time of day, etc. All of this creates juicy data that is then bought and sold by the light bulb company, the app manufacturer, and probably Palantir who then sells it to ICE so they know when you’re home. Motherfucker, you just needed a light bulb, man. So yeah, I miss the capitalism where I exchanged my dollar for your light bulb and that was the end of that. Turns out smart homes are anything but. Peter Thiel does not need to know what kind of light bulbs you use. Or when you’re home.

If we are going to keep functioning in a capitalist world we need to be more careful about where we are spending our money. The local hardware store will only be there as long as you keep using it. Same for the local grocery store, the local café, the local record store, the local pet store, etc. And while it might be easier to get something delivered to your door, I’d encourage you to pay those folks a visit once in a while. Those people are part of your community. Jeff Bezos is barely part of humanity. He does not deserve your dollar. The people at Target do not deserve your dollar. The union-busters at Whole Foods do not deserve your dollar. As someone who does a lot of shipping of zines, books, and assorted other shit, Uline does not get my dollar. (Special shout-out to the DSA for sending out their calendar in a Uline mailer. Fuck yeah, I’m gonna call your ass out on that!) And yes, sometimes the right thing is gonna cost. $8 might seem a great price for a t-shirt—and if all you have is $8 and you need a t-shirt, go ahead and get it!—but selling you an $8 t-shirt means somebody somewhere is getting fucked. (To be fair, if you are at a concert and a t-shirt is $80, the person getting fucked is you.)

The TL;DR on functioning in a capitalist world is to move a little slower, with a little more intention. Your dollar helps people stay in business. Be careful where you put it. I’m not saying it’s easy. As I told at the top of the story, I shamefully let frustration get to me and I took the easy way out. This’ll happen. But every time we keep doing it, we get closer and closer to having no other options than having to shop at a company store run by white supremacists.

America has one neck, and it’s the economy. If you want to change how things are going, you have to change where you’re putting your dollar.

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🙋 Got a question? Ask it! It’s fun for both of us.

💰 Speaking of where you put your dollar, gimme $2/mo and help me keep writing this newsletter.

📣 There are a few seats left in next week’s workshop. If you’re job hunting this workshop will help you get your dollar. Grab ‘em!

🍉 Please give what you can to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The ceasefire is bullshit.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please give what you can to Trans Lifeline.

Over ten years ago I wrote that we need to flip the office. Instead of going to work, we should be going to socialize, converse, and collaborate. Productive solo time is not for the office. Knowledge workers can be productive anywhere but at the office. This is just as pertinent today. There are times when people need to be together, though with video conferencing and proper meeting management we can get a lot done with distributed work.

Even with good meeting practices available and amazing technology, management has consistently been asleep at the wheel. A few years ago I worked with an organization that was returning to hybrid work with some mandated in-office days and some flexible days. I was informed by experienced staff that hybrid work would lose people, as three days in the office and two from anywhere would not be good enough. Who would not agree? Those with families, long commutes, accessibility issues, or people to care for. I was told that it would be a good 40% of people not happy with this type of hybrid work. And soon the attrition accelerated.

Either management has not learned anything over the past decade or management is actively subverting their own workforce to satisfy their need for control. I think that it’s both.

The new year will bring some big changes to the rules on in-office work for many employees across the country — including tens of thousands of provincial government staff in Ontario and Alberta, who will soon be required back in the office full time.

As of Jan. 5, Ontario provincial government employees will be expected to work in the office five days per week.

Alberta’s public service is also returning to full-time, in-office work in February to “strengthen collaboration, accountability and service delivery for Albertans,” a spokesperson for the Alberta government said. —CBC 2026-01-02