I’m a nurse in a small northern Alberta town, not far from the Canadian Rockies. I love living in Alberta and raising my kids here—I have three, ages 17, 10 and seven. I work at the town’s community health complex, which serves as an ER, acute-care clinic and outpatient centre. I suffer from Crohn’s disease, and I’m happy I can give people the care that I would want. It’s cathartic for me to be there for patients on the worst days of their lives.

Right now, health-care workers in Alberta are witnessing something we haven’t seen in generations: the return of measles. As of this writing, some 1,400 people in my province have been infected so far—more cases than in the entire United States. It’s surreal to watch the return of an illness we had all but eradicated.

At every opportunity, I try to convince parents and patients to abandon their anti-vax beliefs and protect their kids and the community. I’ve already had a few successes. I managed to persuade my 30-year-old niece and a family friend by telling them about the damage that measles can cause, how it weakens children’s immune systems and exposes them to other infections. Some of my patients are swayed when they hear about outbreaks in other hospitals putting the most vulnerable patients at risk.

But I regularly come up against people who refuse to immunize. The anti-vaxxers that I meet generally fall into two groups. The first are members of nearby Indigenous communities, where trust in the Canadian health-care system has, understandably, been broken. Recently, I spoke to an Indigenous patient who did not want the vaccine, telling them: “I don’t blame you for not trusting me, but I really hope that you do.” Indigenous communities can also lack access to health care, creating holes in herd immunity.

The second group are the people emboldened by the pandemic-induced war on vaccines. The anti-vax movement has grown stronger in the last few years and has aggressively aligned itself with far-right pundits, conspiracy theorists and fringe doctors who peddle lies. It’s getting harder for parents to sift through fact and fiction. In a throwback to the ’90s, people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have revived the idea that vaccines cause autism. On his show, Joe Rogan hosts anti-vaxxers like Suzanne Humphries, who claims that polio isn’t caused by a virus but by toxins. It’s hard to unscare people once the seed has been planted. They confuse stoicism for safety and correlation for causation. Some don’t worry about measles because it was once a fact of life—they assume it’s harmless because the Brady Bunch once got it.

As an advocate and a nurse, I’ve noticed that more often it’s red-pilled, radicalized men who are making the decision to not vaccinate their children. It’s strange: in the past, moms mostly made the health-care choices for their families. Husbands went along with whatever the wives decided. But lately, I argue more with men who tell me they’ve read stuff online about how vaccines are useless or dangerous. They tell me I’m part of the conspiracy and call me a pharma shill.

I understand where they’re coming from: not long ago, I was an anti-vaxxer, too. I thought vaccines were dangerous and I didn’t want my kids immunized. I truly believed my kids—and society—would be safer without them. In this moment, as fatal diseases are surging and health-care professionals are fighting a losing battle against misinformation, I’ve made it my mission to prevent people from falling for the same lies that ensnared me.

I didn’t join the anti-vaccine movement with a megaphone or a picket sign in my hand. I came to it online, quietly and gradually. In the beginning, it didn’t feel like I was joining anything. It felt like mothering. I grew up the daughter of two immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. After watching their own government fall, they were skeptical of authority. My mom vaccinated me as a kid—we didn’t have internet or podcasts telling us not to. But for my parents, it was second nature to question the government, especially when their kid’s well-being was involved.

I graduated from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and started a career—in STEM, no less. I was a quality-control chemist at a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Edmonton. My job was to monitor chemical reactions, inspect raw materials and make sure that products met safety standards. I believed in science. I followed the procedures.

I married my husband, Thomas, in 2008, and his career eventually took us from Edmonton to rural Alberta. It was beautiful and quiet, and we thought it would be a good place to raise a family. So I quit my job and planned to be a stay-at-home mom.

Back then, I had no strong feelings about vaccines either way; they just were something you got to avoid diseases. When I got pregnant, I did everything I was supposed to: attended prenatal appointments, ate a balanced diet, even got my flu shot.

Things changed when I gave birth to my daughter in 2008. My Crohn’s was in remission at the time. Even so, my doctor and nurses told me I was high-risk, and that complications could arise during pregnancy. I agreed to have a C-section, though I felt pressured into it. I learned later that the complications they warned me about were only likely during a Crohn’s flare-up, but no one told me that at the time. I remember thinking, I didn’t need that surgery. I lost trust in my doctors: I felt like they didn’t tell me the full story.

In the first few months of my daughter’s life, I struggled to breastfeed. When I asked my doctor for help, he brushed it off and told me not to be so heartbroken about it. “If it doesn’t work, just use formula,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” No follow-up. No number to call. No support. But I wanted to breastfeed—I just didn’t know how to fix what wasn’t working. So I went online.

This was before everyone had Facebook. People found community on forums. I ended up on a site called........

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