One Outbreak, Two Countries
The story Alberta’s press has not told about measles, Mennonites, and Mexico
When Alberta’s measles outbreak exploded in the spring of 2025, the province’s political class quickly settled on an apparent preconceived explanation. The New Democratic opposition blamed Premier Danielle Smith for firing her Chief Medical Officer of Health. Left-leaning commentators blamed vaccine skepticism among Albertans and, more broadly, a conservative political culture they argued had normalized distrust of public health. The Tyee ran a piece by Andrew Nikiforuk in July calling Smith the “Queen of Measles.” “Thanks to Smith’s weak and chaotic leadership,” he wrote, “vaccine skepticism and open disregard for public health experts, the number of cumulative measles cases had as of Friday passed 1,179 in Alberta.”
The framing was familiar. For all the bluster, some of the coverage was partly right. Alberta ended 2025 as the most measles-infected jurisdiction per capita in the Americas, with more than 2,000 confirmed cases concentrated in communities with vaccination coverage as low as 29 percent. But the narrative got away from the epidemiology.
There is a thread running through this story that almost nobody in the Alberta press pulled on, and it connects Southern Alberta to the north of Mexico in a way that reframes the outbreak entirely.
As some of you know, I am interested in Mexican politics and culture. While writing my dissertation, I learned about Pancho Villa’s activities in Northern Mexico during the revolutionary period and the interesting connection to Mennonite communities there and here. While doing some digging into Mexico’s recent measles outbreak, where the Morena government curtailed vaccination to save money (read about it here), I realized the connection to Southern Alberta.
The epicentre of Alberta’s outbreak was the region south of Calgary: the Municipal District of Taber, Lethbridge County, and surrounding rural communities. A significant proportion of those communities are home to Low German-speaking Mennonites, a distinct cultural and linguistic population that settled across Alberta from La Crete in the north to the Montana border in the south. These communities carry vaccination rates that fall far below the 95 percent threshold required for herd immunity. In Taber’s municipal district, two-dose measles coverage among young children stood at 29 percent as of 2024. In Lethbridge County, it was 40 percent. These are not recent developments. Academic research published years before the outbreak documented persistent, structurally low vaccination rates among Low German Mennonite private schools and home-schooling families in southern Alberta.
One can pass judgment on them or not, but those are the facts.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 2025, the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico was simultaneously becoming the measles capital of North America. Chihuahua’s outbreak also centred on Mennonite communities, where vaccination rates were estimated at 40 to 50 percent. By August, Chihuahua had recorded nearly 4,000 confirmed cases and most of Mexico’s measles deaths. The virus that lit up Chihuahua and the virus burning through southern Alberta belonged to the same genotype, circulating within a transnational community that, by its nature, does not stop at borders.
This is not a coincidence waiting to be noticed. It is a documented epidemiological reality. The Pan American Health Organization identified a single measles genotype circulating among Mennonite communities across Canada, the United States, Mexico, Belize, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. What appears to be two separate national outbreaks is, in biological terms, a single outbreak distributed across a diaspora.
The Low German-speaking Mennonite community is not a monolith, and it is worth being precise about the sources of vaccine hesitancy. Community health workers in Taber told reporters that the resistance is rooted not in theology so much as in memory. For many families whose roots are in Mexico’s Chihuahua and Durango states, the word vaccine carries a specific historical weight. A community health representative working in Taber, who grew up in a Low German family in Chihuahua, described public health nurses arriving on horse-and-buggy, lining up children without explanation, and administering injections to mothers who had no language to ask what was being given to their children. That memory travelled north with the families. It persists in communities where Spanish was never spoken and Low German remains the first language, communities that remain, by design, somewhat apart from the surrounding society.
Understanding this does not excuse low vaccination rates or their consequences. A premature baby died in Alberta’s outbreak. Children were permanently harmed. But it does complicate the political story that the NDP and their press allies have been peddling. Danielle Smith’s decision to remove a permanent Chief Medical Officer created genuine institutional weakness, and the criticism on that point may seem fair, but it is not directly connected to it. The causation the NDP meant to imply does not exist.
The NDP’s fibs and usage of the Mennonite community carry no political price. The press will not report it, but even if they did, Low German Mennonites in southern Alberta are largely not a political constituency in any meaningful electoral sense. They are not bloc voters, they have no organized lobbying presence, and their theological disposition actively resists the kind of civic engagement that would make them a political actor. The NDP can use them at will without repercussions.
In May 2025, Nenshi, nevertheless, tried to protect himself against accusations of blaming the victims and went directly after the government. He said it was wrong to blame Albertans for forgetting the importance of vaccination when the Smith government was “full of vaccine deniers actively spreading misinformation that discourages people from getting their shots. But this is what we can expect from Danielle Smith and her Health Minister — blame everyone else for their own incompetence.”
What the politicized criticism does not explain is why vaccination rates in southern Alberta’s Low German communities were already catastrophically low before Smith took office, why that structural problem was documented in peer-reviewed research more than a decade ago, and why successive governments of various stripes failed to address it.
It also points toward Mexico in a way the Alberta political debate has conspicuously avoided. The same outbreak that is being used to attack Smith was seeded by the same transnational community dynamic, carrying the same vaccine-hesitancy culture, that produced thousands of deaths and cases in Chihuahua under Mexico’s Morena government presided by López-Obrador. The communities are connected. The virus moved through connections that the political and politicized coverage has preferred to ignore.
Alberta’s outbreak may be a governance story, but it is not a Danielle Smith story. It is a transnational public health story about a geographically dispersed community from Alberta to Paraguay, a centuries-old distrust of state authority, and a virus that requires no passport or political ideology. The press has given Albertans one frame. The fuller picture is more complicated, more interesting, and considerably more honest.