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Three years after her story went viral, the Ottawa mother who changed her mind about vaccines says the angry rhetoric around the issue is driving some anti-vax families away from the health system.

“More calm, clear and caring voices need to be heard,” Tara Hills told delegates at the Canadian Immunization Conference.

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That is, in part, what led Hills to change her mind about vaccines in 2015 — conversations with an Ottawa mother and health advocate who assured her she wasn’t a bad parent and encouraged her to read the evidence about vaccines.

Parents like Hills are of growing interest to health officials as measles makes a comeback around the world, in part, because of vaccine hesitancy.

In 2015, Hills and her husband were Kanata home-schooling parents of seven children. After growing increasingly concerned about vaccines, the family had stopped immunizing their children. But in 2015, Hills began to re-examine her views and was contacted by an Ottawa woman who runs a blog called The Scientific Parent.