Windsor’s top doctor concerned about declining child vaccination rates in Michigan

Health experts associated with Windsor-Essex say declining vaccination rates among children in Michigan are worrying, and it’s important for people along the Canadian border to protect themselves and their families through vaccinations.

Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mehdi Alloosh said the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit (WECHU) focuses on risk factors affecting the region, including declining vaccination rates in other jurisdictions.

“I saw … those numbers; they were very worrying,” he said.

“And they show … how quickly all the progress in vaccination and public health protection can be reversed.”

Alosh’s comments come in response to a Reuters analysis of state data that found that the completion rate for a series of seven vaccinations among children under three years of age fell by nearly three percentage points to 66.5 percent from January 2025 to January this year.

The series included the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot and shots for whooping cough and hepatitis B.

The analysis falls between a Measles cases rise again During the second term of President Donald Trump in America.

“Close proximity to populations experiencing undervaccination puts people at risk — again, those who are unvaccinated or undervaccinated,” Alosh said.

But he added, “If children in our community are fully vaccinated, there is no need to worry.”

The health unit works with health care providers to talk to patients about the importance of vaccination, and when “the risk level goes higher, our efforts go higher in terms of protecting our population,” he said.

The health unit confirms the vaccination status of school children, Alosh said.

According to data from the health unit’s website, during the 2024-2025 school year, 94.4 percent of students were vaccinated against measles, 94.3 percent were vaccinated against mumps and 95.5 percent were vaccinated against rubella.

The measles vaccine is one of the most studied interventions in medical history, according to Dr. Fahad Razak, A Internal medicine physician and Canada Research Chair at St. Michael’s Hospital and professor at the University of Toronto.

“We’ve used it literally a billion times,” said Razak, who is from Windsor.

“And we know that if you’ve been vaccinated, you’re essentially 100 percent protected from severe disease and, in most circumstances, protected from even getting infected in the first place.”

But a small number of children are not fully protected by the vaccine, he said, so maintaining high vaccination rates in the larger population is important to protect them.

Razak said, measles is one of the most infectious diseases ever encountered.

But he said those who vaccinate their children will ensure they are protected from infections coming from the United States.

“I think it’s really a story that Americans have a problem that they have to deal with,” he said.

“Canada has a different issue that I think is very addressable here, and it’s not relying on Americans to ramp up their vaccinations. And it would be very clear that we can do that for ourselves. It’s about securing our population.”

The decline in vaccination rates in Michigan is about 13 times greater than the average annual change over the past 18 years. Only during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the U.S. financial crisis in 2008 did the rate decline more sharply, which hit Michigan particularly hard.

Reuters has given this news Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.According to interviews with more than two dozen public health officials, parents, researchers and community advocates across the state, the persistent attacks on vaccines have had the primary impact on white families who chose not to vaccinate their children, while the Trump administration’s deportation campaign against immigrants has kept Latino families away from public clinics.

Kennedy has for years been promoting the view that routine childhood shots are linked to rising autism and chronic disease rates, contrary to scientific evidence that poses a greater threat than the diseases they prevent.

Razak said Michigan’s situation poses a threat to Windsorites for two reasons: because cross-border travel poses a risk of spreading the virus and because of the impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric in the American media.

“I would say this is a really important time to draw a distinction between politics and health care,” he said.

“We’ve always tried to be neutral on health care, talk about the science, talk about protecting people from what we understand. It’s the same story today in Canada. … You have to look at a place like the United States now and know that the health message has unfortunately now become tainted by the political situation.”