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Ontario now boasts 1,243 cases and the number is accelerating rapidly — up 223 cases in a week. By comparison, the biggest U.S. hot spot, in Texas, totals just 683 cases for a population of 30 million people — about half as many cases in a state with double the people, making Ontario’s outbreak four times worse per capita.

Texas happens to be in the heart of Donald Trump’s America, where Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. routinely spouts anti-vaccine propaganda that is spreading across borders. Ontario styles itself anti-Trump territory, yet it too is infected by an anti-vax virus that is exporting measles across borders and has left 84 people hospitalized here, including 63 children so far.

Premier Doug Ford just campaigned on a promise to “Protect Ontario� from political peril that would harm our economic health. Yet his government has failed miserably in protecting the province from a measles virus that is hurting our medical health at home.

Ontario’s problem is not just vaccine hesitancy but bureaucratic timidity and political infirmity. The tragedy of the measles story is not just about a natural virus but a man-made disaster that is quintessentially Canadian.

For in Canada’s live and let live political culture, children may die merely because grown-ups tiptoe around the obligation of vaccination. Rather than making it a responsibility and a duty, Canadian politicians respond to hesitancy with hope and a prayer, adopting the path of least resistance in turbulent times.

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, has been strangely silent about the spread of measles. His political master, Health Minister Sylvia Jones, has been sadly ineffective in turning the tide while making excuses for her inaction.

Liberal health critic Dr. Adil Shamji, an emergency room physician, lamented in the legislature this week that government inertia has led to the “worst measles outbreak in the last three decades.�

Anti-vaxxers and rejectionists aren’t unaware of the arguments. They just don’t agree with them, and no amount of repetition will win the day — as the premier discovered during the pandemic, when he found the political will to expel anti-vax MPPs from caucus.

In the past, conventional information programs could be counted on to make progress — Canada eliminated measles in 1998, nearly three decades ago. But that was the era of doctor knows best.

In today’s social media misinformation climate, doctors are deemed second best. TikTok influencers reign supreme while fringe faith leaders preach to the converted that vaccinations are a violation (even though all major religious authorities support inoculations).

Against that backdrop, the notion that a stodgy government campaign on social media could ever counter the false prophets of vaccine hysteria is surely wishful thinking. Counting on education as the solution for vaccination will not get us where we need to go.

The world has changed and Ontario needs to change with it. Public service announcements won’t keep the province’s children safe, because persuasion alone is no longer a proven remedy to parental resistance and ignorance.

Yes, an information campaign may win over a decent majority of civic-minded people, but it won’t come close to the 95 per cent vaccination rate needed to achieve the “herd immunity� that stops the spread of measles. Information campaigns only work at the margins, family by family, but cannot compete with anger algorithms that scale up ignorance and reticence at warp speed.

Outreach won’t reach outliers and can’t rein in outbreaks. Barely 70 per cent of Ontario children aged seven are fully immunized, well below pre-pandemic levels — proof that a passive approach won’t move the needle.

Why should that be surprising? You can barely persuade a slim majority of Canadians to agree on anything, so why expect a 95 per cent consensus on an issue as controversial as vaccines today?

The sad truth is that medical science and political science are never congruent. Public health doctors who cling to the fiction that facts will win the day are simply out of their league, because that’s not how the misinformation world works.

Ontario’s essentially voluntary vaccination protocols for communicable diseases are so outdated that they invite an outbreak: Any parent can claim an exemption for their children by citing a “religious or philosophical� objection and going through the motions of watching an online motion picture video; they need only fill out a form and get it witnessed — granting them a license to potentially spread measles to others.

That may have worked in the past, when the dissenters were few in number and didn’t cross borders. Today, the trend lines have moved up, which is why many other jurisdictions have tightened the religious and philosophical loopholes, leaving room only for genuine medical exemptions.

It’s time for the premier to truly “protect Ontario� — and the rest of North America — from a measles outbreak of our own making.