How Alberta Gave Measles the Advantage

Danielle Smith promotes and thrives on post-pandemic chaos. It’s putting children at too much risk.

Thanks to the unending chaos-making of Premier Danielle Smith, southern Albertans woke up last week to discover they now live in a special post-pandemic geography.

Alberta Health Services, an agency that Smith has dismantled because she didn’t approve of its COVID response, declared last week that “all individuals living, working, or attending school in, or travelling to” southern Alberta now live in a zone exploding with the world’s most contagious virus.

And not by happenstance. Smith, a vaccine skeptic and disease contrarian, has worked hard to make her province a burgeoning measles republic.

Silencing the top doctor

When the first cases of the virus appeared in March, she said nothing.

In April chief medical officer of health Dr. Mark Joffe resigned because he wasn’t allowed to speak loudly and say much about the importance of immunization and the containment of a nasty virus in difficult-to-reach rural communities.

After his resignation Joffe pronounced that the measles epidemic represented “a complete failure of leadership at all levels.”

When the cases started to explode exponentially in May, Smith still said nothing. Or not much. At one point the premier repeated the phrase “Don’t get measles. Get vaccinated.”

Did she mean it? Who knows given all the other times she’s signalled distrust of vaccines.

A proven defence

Measles is an ancient virus that modern medicine had largely banished from public concern in Canada. But thanks to the slow and reluctant response of the Smith government, it has become a massive force in Alberta infecting more than 600 people, most of them children. Most of the cases — more than 450 — have occurred in southern Alberta.

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https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/05/28/Alberta-Gave-Measles-Advantage/