Thank you for this comment! I think it clarifies some important things about what’s actually going on on the ground level, and I genuinely appreciate the additional context.
However, I disagree that “the effect of occultism on the return of measles cannot be overstated”. I feel like it is being overstated right now! People believe a lot of deranged things, but I believe that you are wrong about the extent that people are willing to choose those beliefs over the health and lives of their children and others in the community. I am not saying that this never happens, but I think it genuinely does not happen that often, and when it does it is genuinely contentious.
You can also reduce the amount it happens when you have nurses and support workers who understand the culture and can work with it. From the CBC interview:
TD: Can you give us a sense of why there’s vaccine hesitancy in some Mennonite communities?
CF: The biggest thing is that they don’t want to not trust God. So their faith has a lot to do with it. Once I was able to help a lot of them understand that God has created doctors for the purpose of helping them, they would listen a little bit more.
TD: What lessons do you think you’ve learned working with Mennonite communities during this measles outbreak?
CF: The biggest thing for us, my coworker and I, is to just get them to trust us. If they don’t want to vaccinate, we respect that. Because they see that we respect their values, they start to really trust and understand that we’re here to help them, not to hurt them.
From another interview she did earlier in 2025 for a Canadian magazine, Macleans:
When it comes to measles in particular, most families just don’t understand the seriousness of the condition. They think that, like chicken pox, contracting it will create immunity. They don’t know that measles could lead to other illnesses and be particularly harmful for children, whose developing bodies are more vulnerable to the infection and its complications.
and
This work has gone a long way. Clients come to us asking about measles and vaccinations after hearing about the severity of cases from their friends and family. We’ve had many productive conversations about immunization and how it intersects with religious beliefs and community health.
Many of my clients are trying to do what’s best for their families, and they respect authority as long as they feel respected in turn. They do, however, have internal struggles about whether getting vaccinated is a betrayal of their faith or whether it could cause harm. But once they’ve considered how immunization can help vulnerable people, some of them even feel a little embarrassed over how strongly they opposed it. All in all, we’ve managed to give at least half of our patients vaccines since I started working at the clinic—and the rate of vaccination has increased since the outbreak started.
Proudly, she recalls seeing a lightbulb go off for one woman who described an epiphany in one of her recent groups.
“She said, ‘I can make decisions for my family, and it doesn’t have to be public knowledge. I can make these decisions and not share it with my family members if they ask and I can just say that’s my business,’” Meggison said, and described other women nodded in response to this passionate declaration.
This does not sound to me like a community that is lost to conspiracist thinking. It sounds like a community that is wrestling with live issues.
I’ll also note that the degree of suspicion and hesitation in the community seem actually sort of justified, in that there’s been a string of broken promises between the mennonites and the Canadian government. From Macleans:
Our ancestors came from Europe, and when they settled in Canada, they negotiated a number of promises with the Canadian government—including educational independence. When some provinces later passed laws requiring Mennonite children to attend public schools, many families, wanting to hold tight to their religious and cultural identity, emigrated to South America.
Over the course of doing my reserach, I also found a significant number of stories of under-communicated or coerced vaccinations like this, set in the mid 20th century in Canada and up to the modern day in Mexico:
She remembers a public health nurse rolling into her Mexican hometown of Durango on horse-and-buggy with a cooler of vaccines. The nurse told Meggison’s mother to line up her 12 children in the yard, asked for their ages, and immunized them, without explanation.
“She didn’t know what had been given to her kids. She didn’t have the language skills to ask the questions,” Meggison said about her mother, whose primary language was Low German.
This seems like a terrifying thing to have gone through, and I understand how it could foster mistrust and give cover to more conspiratorial thinking.
Thank you for this comment! I think it clarifies some important things about what’s actually going on on the ground level, and I genuinely appreciate the additional context.
However, I disagree that “the effect of occultism on the return of measles cannot be overstated”. I feel like it is being overstated right now! People believe a lot of deranged things, but I believe that you are wrong about the extent that people are willing to choose those beliefs over the health and lives of their children and others in the community. I am not saying that this never happens, but I think it genuinely does not happen that often, and when it does it is genuinely contentious.
You can also reduce the amount it happens when you have nurses and support workers who understand the culture and can work with it. From the CBC interview:
From another interview she did earlier in 2025 for a Canadian magazine, Macleans:
and
Lastly, here is a passage from an article covering the outbreak in Alberta:
This does not sound to me like a community that is lost to conspiracist thinking. It sounds like a community that is wrestling with live issues.
I’ll also note that the degree of suspicion and hesitation in the community seem actually sort of justified, in that there’s been a string of broken promises between the mennonites and the Canadian government. From Macleans:
Over the course of doing my reserach, I also found a significant number of stories of under-communicated or coerced vaccinations like this, set in the mid 20th century in Canada and up to the modern day in Mexico:
This seems like a terrifying thing to have gone through, and I understand how it could foster mistrust and give cover to more conspiratorial thinking.