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Canada has one of the lowest child vaccination rates in the developed world. With about one tenth of Canadian children now going unvaccinated, this means that up to 750,000 young Canadians have no immunity whatsoever against diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and measles.

As outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases begin to re-emerge, Ottawa has poured $3.4 million into a pro-vaccination ad campaign that critics have denounced as “milquetoast and flaccid.”

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Vignettes from a pre-immunization Canada as childhood vaccination rates plummet Back to video

Perhaps the federal government would have been better served by reminding Canadians of the alternative to vaccination: A country wracked by fear, tragedy and landscapes of dead and paralyzed children. Below, a few vignettes from a pre-immunization Canada.

Annual wintertime outbreaks used to kill hundreds

Say the words “Walkerton, Ontario” and most Canadians will immediately conjure up the 2000 tragedy where a contaminated municipal water supply sickened thousands and killed six. But it wasn’t too long ago that Walkerton-sized health tragedies were to be expected every time Canadians started to spend more time indoors. In 1943 alone Canada logged 19,000 cases of the now-vaccine-preventable whooping cough, with 416 deaths. Victims were disproportionately babies, meaning that if those 1943 whooping cough fatalities had lived, they would now be roughly the age of Joni Mitchell or Phil Esposito. Measles, another now-vaccine-preventable disease, killed 800 in 1926. It was still killing up to 100 children per year well into the 1960s, and leaving as many as 300 with permanent mental retardation.