Oh Canada. What have you done? Over the past couple decades, Canada has allowed measles vaccination rates to fall so low that the virus has once again gotten a spikehold in the country. This measle-y fact has now led to the Pan American Health Organization on Monday officially revoking the measles elimination status that Canada had worked so hard to attain back in 1998. Could the U.S. soon lose the mealses elimination status that its had since 2000 as well with falling vaccination rates making America measle-ly again?
Canada Has Not Been Able To Control Measles Outbreaks For 12 Months
The World Health Organization—along with regional offices of the WHO like PAHO—considers measles to be eliminated from a country when the country can clearly demonstrate that the measles virus is no longer circulating in its population. That ain’t easy and requires lots of surveillance info being collected and presented. That’s also something that the Great White North can unfortunately no longer claim.
Since October 2024, the country has had measles outbreaks that have kept going and going and going now for over 12 consecutive months. That one-year mark is the threshold for the WHO saying “byeee” to any kind of e-status or elimination status. Those continuing outbreaks have led to, for sure, a lot of measles cases, over 5,000 reported ones over the past year, mostly in Ontario and Alberta.
Measles Vaccination Rates In Canada Have Fallen Well Below 95%
To understand how Canada got to this sorry state, look no further than the falling measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates. Health Canada data show that from 2019 to 2022, MMR coverage dropped like a hockey puck each year from 89.5% to 87.9% to 84.5% to 81.3%. The 89.5% was already significantly below an important threshold you may have heard of: the herd immunity threshold for measles.
The herd immunity threshold is the percentage of a population that needs to be practically completely immune to a virus so that the virus can no longer easily find enough unprotected people to infect to continue to spread. It’s akin to occupying enough parking spaces in a parking lot so that a beat up car can’t stick around. For measles, the herd immunity threshold is fairly high: 95%. That’s because the measles virus is so contagious. One infected person can get somewhere between 12 and 18 susceptible people infected.
There are only two ways to get immune protection against the measles virus: survive a measles infection or get vaccinated. The latter is much easier since measles is not a fun disease to get. While many may fully recover from the disease, getting infected is sort of like playing roulette with your body parts, like very important body parts. In the U.S., about one in five unvaccinated people who have gotten the measles have ended up hospitalized. I have described in Forbes before about how measles can lead to all sorts of bad stuff like life-threatening pneumonia, threatening swelling of the brain and so-called “immune amnesia,” which is when your immune system kind of forgets how to work.
Canada got to measles elimination status 27 years ago by maintaining high enough vaccination rates. But now all of that is gone baby gone. Over the past year, Alberta has been the province with the highest concentration of cases. And, guess what, this province has been ground central in Canada for the don’t-get-vaccinated-in the-name-of-personal-freedoms argument. Canadian public health officials have been trying to counter that argument with maybe-understand-that-we-are-all-connected-and-can-help-each-other-get-rid-this-disease-again fact. Saying that your decision whether to get vaccinated against the measles is purely a personal freedoms issue is sort of like saying that you have the personal freedom to just poop anywhere on the sidewalk or on the hot bar at the grocery store.
The good news is that measles elimination status is not like your virginity. It’s not a once you lose it, you can never get it back situation. Canada could still reclaim the status if it can rapidly increase MMR vaccination rates again. That’s rapidly with a capital “R” because arrghh this virus is like a termite, once it is established somewhere it can be really hard to root out of the population. But that will require a lot effort and resources, much more than it would have taken to maintain elimination status in the first place.
Is The U.S. On The Verge Of Losing Measles Elimination Status Too
The U.S. followed Canada in getting to measles elimination status in 2000, two years after Canada had achieved that landmark. The question now is whether the U.S. will soon follow Canada in losing—or maybe a better term is frittering away—that status. As I covered in Forbes in August, childhood vaccination rates in the U.S. have continued to drop. Meanwhile, surprise, surprise, more and more measles outbreaks have been occurring in the U.S. Things have been particularly bad this year with measles outbreaks persisting since January and the country already having over 1,600 measles cases in 2025 alone. As a result, America has only about two months to get its act together before losing measles elimination status as well.
So, does this mean that the U.S. government, in particular the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has been sounding the alarm to get more people vaccinated against the measles in order to contain these outbreaks. Not exactly. In fact, a recent survey of U.S. adults by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that the percentage of respondents who would recommend the MMR vaccine for eligible children in their household has dropped from 90% in November 2024 down to 82% in August 2025. The survey also revealed significant confusion over whether U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is recommending that children be vaccinated against measles.
If the U.S. were to lose measles elimination status, this would be an example of creating a problem that didn’t exist since 2000. It would be reversing the advances made by public health at the end of last century, effectively telling diseases that have been already handled, “Come on down again.” That would be sort of like going back to rotary telephones and 8-track tapes again.
