The anti-vaxxers are winning the war

Most people have long since moved past the pandemic and the impact it had on them. But for a small group of anti-vaccine skeptics, their fight against reason, science and our collective well-being continues to define their lives. They continue to gerrymander public health data in ways that confirm their biases and obsess over long-disproven conspiracy theories, including the supposedly negative impact the COVID-19 vaccine had on mortality rates. Now, it seems, their rearguard battle has yielded an important victory.

In a town hall event scheduled for June dubbed “An Injection of Truth,” UCP MLA Eric Bouchard — who just happens to occupy former premier Jason Kenney’s seat — has organized a gathering of Canada’s biggest vaccine scolds. As if that isn't bad enough, they’re going to focus on the supposedly negative impact of mRNA vaccines on children. “Why are an excessive number of Alberta’s children dying? Since 2021, excessive deaths for children are up 350 per cent. But why?”

They mean “excess” deaths, not “excessive” but that aside, there’s not a shred of evidence to support this figure. According to Statistics Canada’s data, the mortality rates among children under one increased slightly from 4.6 per 1,000 in 2021 to 5.3 in 2022 (which is still lower than it was in 2018), while it remained static at 0.2 per 1,000 among those one to five years old and 0.1 per 1,000 among those five to nine. If anything, any increase in excess deaths over this period could just as easily be correlated with them contracting COVID-19 given how comparatively low the uptake was for vaccines among children.

These facts will have little purchase on the feelings of those attending this event, though. The roster of speakers includes a number of doctors who trade in conspiracy theories about so-called “turbo cancers” caused by the vaccine and the list of their colleagues who have supposedly died prematurely as a result of taking it. In its October 2023 hearing into the conduct of Mark Trozzi, one of those scheduled speakers, the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal noted that “in promoting a false narrative about 80 deceased doctors, he targeted private individuals, causing distress to their grieving families.”

This is the sort of paranoid nonsense that has no business being taken seriously, least of all by the political party that controls the levers of power in Canada’s fourth-largest province. Health Minister Adriana LaGrange suggested this was just about wanting constituents to feel “heard” but the message about the supposed impact of mRNA vaccines on children seems to have the full endorsement and backing of the United Conservative Party’s board of directors. “We have serious concerns about them for children,” UCP president Rob Smith told CBC News. "I would say that the board of directors' position is that if parents are going to get their children vaccinated, they need to be very, very sure that they know what they're doing."

Gaslighting them about the supposed dangers of a vaccine that’s been proven safe won’t help there, of course. With more than 100 million COVID vaccinations, data gathered by the Public Health Agency of Canada shows a grand total of four deaths that can be causally linked to them. More people — far more, in fact — die as a result of anesthesia (roughly 1 out of every 100,000 versus 0.004 per 100,000 for COVID vaccines) but nobody is seriously entertaining the idea that doctors should be performing surgeries without it.

And, of course, there are the lives these vaccines saved. As the C.D. Howe Institute noted back in December 2022, the widespread uptake in vaccines resulted in 21 per cent fewer cases, 37 per cent fewer hospitalizations and 34,900 fewer deaths from January 2021 to May 2022. This is, by any rational and reasonable analysis, one of the great public health success stories of our lifetime.

But the people who continue to obsess over the supposedly negative impacts of these vaccines are neither rational nor reasonable. Instead, they’ll spend the rest of their lives moving the goalposts around the field in ways that help them avoid the inevitable confrontation with this scientific reality. This wouldn’t be an issue — flat-earthers still exist, after all — if it was just about their behaviour and beliefs. As adults, they’re at least theoretically competent to make their own decisions and they’re free to make the wrong ones if they insist.

But by taking direct aim at the impact of mRNA vaccines on children, they’re effectively threatening the broader consensus around other childhood vaccinations that’s already been badly damaged by previous waves of anti-vaccine fear mongering. Diseases like whooping cough and measles are making an entirely unwelcome comeback due entirely to declining childhood vaccination rates.

This is the real danger posed by the UCP’s ongoing tango with the province’s anti-vaccine activists and enthusiasts. If even a small portion of the population decides to stop vaccinating their children against previously contained diseases like measles, that can lead to outbreaks that put children in far more danger than any vaccine could ever present. That these outbreaks will spread most aggressively in the same communities that most vociferously oppose vaccinations, or that it will be their own children who are most at risk, doesn’t seem to matter.

This seems destined to end badly, either with the return of other previously vanquished diseases or the arrival of another pandemic. We could avoid this if the Conservative politicians and pundits in our midst were willing to finally and forcefully tell their supporters the truth here, unpopular though it may be. Instead, they seem determined to continue humouring these delusions, no matter how dangerous they become.