Ottawa Public Health (OPH) has issued approximately 3,000 suspension orders to students whose vaccination records were not up to date.
Public health immunization surveillance of students in specific grades is a means of increasing vaccination rates and helping to better understand overall vaccine coverage.
This year, OPH looked at vaccination records of students in grades 2 and 12 across the city, first sending out notices of incomplete vaccination records and eventually suspension orders to those who had failed to update their records.
Suspending students is considered a last resort in public health efforts to ensure students are fully vaccinated when they attend school, something that is required under Ontario’s Immunization of School Pupils Act unless students have an exemption for medical or philosophical reasons.
This is the first year OPH has issued suspension notices to students since before the pandemic. The increased surveillance comes as an historically large measles outbreak continues to spread in Ontario, with more than 2,000 people — mainly infants, children and youth — infected since the beginning of the year.
Most of the cases in the outbreak have been centred in southwestern Ontario. They include a premature infant, who was infected with measles while in the womb and later died.
Ottawa has seen two measles cases this year — the first since 2019 — but they were related to travel and not the ongoing outbreak.
Measles is one of the most contagious infectious illnesses, and it is vaccine preventable. But, especially since the pandemic, Ontario and Canada’s traditionally high vaccination rates have begun to slide.
The public health school surveillance work is aimed at helping people catch up on missed vaccines, to update their children’s records and helping public health officials better understand vaccination rates.
Ottawa Public Health, working with school officials, checked the immunization status of children in Grade 2 and in Grade 12 during the 2024-2025 school year.
It issued 15,000 first notices reminding families to update their children’s records, 9,000 suspension notices and, later, around 3,000 suspension orders to those who had failed to comply.
“Ahead of any suspension, the focus is to ensure parents and guardians are aware of how to verify their records, get any missing routine vaccinations and update their records with OPH,” the public health unit said in a statement, adding that suspensions are “always a last resort.”
The students surveillance system is time-consuming, but it is one of the few ways for health officials to understand immunization rates.
There have long been calls for Ontario to create an electronic immunization registry that records a person’s vaccines over a lifetime and records vaccines given in all settings. That is not currently the case, which means there is no reliable way to record timely immunization information for all Ontario residents.
There is a partial electronic records system, but it does not automatically record all vaccines — requiring families to have to manually send their children’s information to public health, for example.
Even at the end of a school year of surveillance efforts, Ottawa Public Health says it does not have overall numbers about what percentage of students in grades 2 and 12 are vaccinated because the immunization data system Ontario uses is not working properly. A spokesperson for OPH said they will be able to update vaccination information in the first week of July when the data issue is resolved.
The most recent data available is from the 2022-23 school year, when 80.3 per cent of seven year olds were vaccinated for measles, compared to 94.5 in 2016-17. The national goal is 95 per cent.
In 2022-23, 92.9 per cent of 17 year olds in the city were vaccinated for measles. In the same year, fewer than two per cent of 7 and 17 year olds in Ottawa were exempted from vaccination. Public health officials have said they have seen no signs that has changed significantly.
In a memo to trustees written earlier this month, Pino Buffone, director of education at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said just a handful of OCDSB students were ultimately suspended for 20 days and they have since returned to school. Schools worked with students and families to provide learning materials during that time “to reduce the impact of missed instructional time.”
