Why Ontario’s measles outbreak highlights our need for a vaccine registry

Posted on February 12, 2026 in Health Policy Context

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Contributors
Feb. 12, 2026.   By Iris Gorfinkel, Contributor

After 30 years of family medicine, I can’t believe we still rely on yellow cards. Yet here I am, handing another one to a mother whose baby boy I’ve just vaccinated. She’s grateful: when they move to London, Ont., she’ll have his record — but Ontario won’t.  That’s because there’s still no province-wide vaccine registry.

The result? Toronto Public Health recently sent letters to over 16,000 parentsthreatening to suspend their kids if their immunizations weren’t caught up. Many of those children are fully vaccinated, but because TPH was never told, their records appear incomplete. That gap exists because reporting vaccines is left to parents instead of the clinicians who give them.

To address this, Public Health Ontario recently released a proposal to modernize immunization records and strengthen the province’s response to future outbreaks. This isn’t their first warning. The Ontario Immunization Advisory Committee, which advises PHO, issued a position statement calling for a provincial registry just 15 months earlier.

You’d hope this government would have learned its lesson after over 14,000 Ontarians lost their lives to COVID-19. Instead, the report gathered dust on a government shelf, leaving the measles virus free to exploit the gap.

And exploit it did: Within weeks, the first case was confirmed. From October 2024 to October 2025, Ontario recorded nearly 2,400 measles cases across 26 public health units: 7 per cent of cases required hospital admission and one baby died. Nearly 90 per cent of cases were unimmunized.

The writing was on the wall. Public health reports documented a sharp post-pandemic decline in routine childhood vaccines, including measles. They knew vaccine exemptions in York Region had risen more than tenfold over the past seven years but the patchwork of school and child care records limited what they could do about it.

Local public health units were left scrambling to understand who was protected. Some resorted to school closures. Staff spent countless hours chasing paper and faxes instead of getting vaccines into arms, precisely when speed counted most.

The fix is no mystery. For years, public health leaders have called for a comprehensive provincial immunization registry, but efforts have been stymied, making it impossible to map out low-coverage areas.

A modern registry would show which children are overdue and which communities are most at risk — wherever they show up for care. In just a few clicks, clinicians anywhere in Ontario could see who needs which shot, and parents could pull up their child’s official record on a phone or computer in seconds.

Outbreaks trigger investigations, spark fear and result in preventable hospitalizations, long-term complications and deaths. It’s why registries became a pillar of Canada’s 2025-2030 National Immunization Strategy.

A registry isn’t a luxury item — it’s a cheap insurance against the far higher bills that come with letting diseases spread in the dark and belongs in the same category as clean water and safe food inspection. It’s basic public health infrastructure.

Ontario’s measles outbreak has laid bare how vulnerable we are without the essential tools needed to know who is protected and who is not. How many more cases of measles must there be? Worse, how many other vaccine-preventable diseases must Ontarians suffer before a vaccine registry is seen as worth the cost?

We have already paid the price in thousands of infections and a lost elimination status. The solution is clear — and it’s not a crumpled yellow vaccine card. Ontarians need to demand, loudly, that the province fund a comprehensive immunization registry. Not a pilot or patched-together upgrade, but a secure, province-wide system that’s accessible from family doctors’ offices to ERs across the province.

It’s not only public health: Parents, schools and clinicians cannot be left piecing together vaccine records from crumpled yellow cards while vaccine-preventable diseases race ahead. Scrambled spreadsheets and guesswork are failing strategies that leave the most underserved communities at the back of the line.

A modern vaccine registry would replace that chaos and give every Ontarian the best shot at staying safe.

Iris Gorfinkel is a family physician and clinical researcher in Toronto.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/why-ontarios-measles-outbreak-highlights-our-need-for-a-vaccine-registry/article_277c3234-e884-4957-8b12-99345cec35a6.html

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