Waterloo Region’s Vaccine Record

Every spring, thousands of local families get a letter from Public Health and hundreds of students are sent home from school because their vaccine records are out of date. In 2025 measles came back to the region for the first time since 2019. Here are the local numbers, what the law requires, and what is still missing.

1. Waterloo Region at a glance

Sources for every figure are linked in the sections below.

2. What Ontario law requires

Under Ontario’s Immunization of School Pupils Act, every student must have proof of vaccination, or a valid exemption, on file with the local medical officer of health for nine diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, meningococcal disease, whooping cough and chickenpox. Each spring, Region of Waterloo Public Health checks its records, writes to families whose records are incomplete, then issues suspension orders. Students with no up-to-date record and no exemption on the suspension date are kept out of school until their records are brought up to date.

3. Suspensions, year by year

The numbers below are Public Health’s own, as reported in its notices and in the local press. A suspended student can return to class as soon as a parent reports vaccines the child already had, or the child gets caught up. Some suspensions reflect missing paperwork rather than missing vaccines; Public Health does not publish how many. Either way, each spring they find thousands of children whose protection is unknown.

The trend is in the right direction: fewer students suspended in 2026 than in 2024 or 2025. But the starting numbers are large. In 2026, more than 13,000 local students were asked for missing records, and more than 10,000 received suspension orders before most families responded.

4. Measles comes back

• March 2025: Waterloo Region confirmed its first local measles case since 2019, with an exposure at a medical building on Benton Street in Kitchener on 18 March.
• April–May 2025: cases climbed as the province’s outbreak spread through southwestern Ontario. In mid-May, the Waterloo Region District School Board closed Eastwood Collegiate in Kitchener after a confirmed case, so Public Health could check students’ vaccination records. The region had 59 cases at the time.
• 10 June 2025: Public Health Ontario counted 89 outbreak cases in Waterloo Region, 13.2 per 100,000 people.
• July 2025: no new cases in Waterloo Region after 8 July. Ontario declared its outbreak over on 6 October 2025.

Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang, the region’s medical officer of health, said at the time: “Measles is highly contagious and spreads easily among those who are unvaccinated.”

5. The Ontario picture

In January 2026, the Ontario Immunization Advisory Committee published An Immunization Action Plan for Ontario: Lessons from the Provincial Measles Outbreak. Its findings:

The committee also found that Ontario has no complete immunization registry. Public Health relies on parents to report their children’s vaccines, which is why so many records are “out of date” each spring. Enforcement of the Act varies between health units, many do not enforce it in private schools, and home-schooled children are not consistently assessed — and private schools are often where the children of the hardest-hit communities are enrolled. Its first recommendation is a provincial registry covering every resident and every vaccine provider.

6. What we still don’t know

We could not find current, published figures for Waterloo Region on:

• the share of local 7-year-olds and 17-year-olds fully protected against measles;
• how many local students have non-medical exemptions on file, and whether that number is rising;
• how private schools and home-schooled children in the region are assessed;
• how many of the students suspended each spring were in fact unvaccinated, rather than simply missing paperwork.

These are fair questions for Region of Waterloo Public Health and for Regional Council, and the answers matter more after a year of measles in our schools. If you have the figures, or you are a reporter who has asked, please write to drpolevoy@yahoo.com.

7. What parents can do