By Joe Wright

When it comes to regulatory tyranny, Canada and the United States have been one-upping each other for some time. For most people who believe in medical choice, the march toward mandatory vaccination has raised an alarm, but for students of history it should be forced reeducation of any type that signifies when the final line is about to be crossed. Ontario, Canada has a new proposal…

Ontario holds Canada’s highest population and has long been setting vaccine standards which have been trending toward authoritarian. Its new Immunization 2020 initiative seeks to build upon decades-old policies requiring by law that students be vaccinated in order to attend school, as well as children attending licensed daycare centers.

From there, Ontario became a leader in all of North America at creating a centralized framework for promoting free vaccination and the creation of a database called “Panorama,” which could “more effectively track and analyze immunization coverage rates for school-aged children.” Admittedly, this was “a critical step in laying the groundwork for a provincial immunization registry for all Ontarians.”

However, despite the massive public funding that has built this system, Ontario is still displeased, and appears to be taking even stronger measures to target compliance for those who remain unconvinced of the touted benefits. In fact, their first bullet point covering the “pressures” to their 2020 initiative reveals a strange dichotomy given the massively increased exposure the public has had to the official message: “Changing public attitudes and greater hesitancy about vaccines.”

Essentially, this is an admission that in the free market of information, the pro-vaccine argument in Ontario is losing. There are many reasons for this beyond the scope of this article, but one only has to consult the large database of evidence compiled by vaccine researcher Catherine Frompovich to understand the growing hesitancy. Naturally, as the meme above captures so aptly, when the State considers itself to have an unimpeachable idea, it often makes the adoption of those ideas mandatory.