RECENTLY, I REPORTED for The Walrus on how Alberta lost the plot on measles in 2025.

My vantage on the whole thing was near field. I’m a family doctor in Alberta who delivers babies, and for months, it seemed measles came up in most patient visits. Pregnant people wanted to know whether they could get sick. They might. Risks included pregnancy losses, sick newborns, and stillbirths. Measles had been eliminated before I went to medical school, so I had no direct experience of it, but these were all outcomes I knew from my training.

On September 18, 2025, nearly finished my reporting for The Walrus, I decided to submit an Access to Information request to the province, flagging myself as a reporter. Things I wanted to know included: How many confirmed cases of measles in pregnant women had been reported in Alberta since March 1, 2025? Of those with antenatal measles, how many had been hospitalized? How many had preterm labour? How many infants had been diagnosed with congenital measles? And, most crucially, how many stillbirths or neonatal deaths occurred within the first twenty-eight days?

Perhaps because I’d provided too many specifics in my query, the day after, an information officer suggested I amend it to specifically request copies of all communication between Alberta Health Services, Primary Care Alberta, and the Ministry of Health regarding maternal and perinatal outcomes related to measles, from March to the end of August.

I agreed, and two months later, I received a file and was charged $25.

That I was being charged so little did not bode well. I downloaded the file. My heart quickened a little as I clicked on the folder. Waiting inside were a meagre twenty-six pages of emails, much of the relevant information redacted.

Then, buried amongst emails debating the definition of congenital measles, the saddest one of all, from September 17, with the opening line: “Here is the death certificate as we discussed earlier.” Which must have been for the baby whose death was announced in October, two weeks after the request for the certificate was circulated. Today, to check my timeline was correct, I went looking for the news release from the province that must have announced the baby’s death. I could find nothing.

What all this amounts to, for me, is a province that understood the stakes of the measles outbreak and of the impact of preventable illness on a beleaguered health care system, yet failed to share what it knew, in real time, about the harm being done to its most vulnerable citizens. Despite internal emails indicating miscarriages, stillbirths, and at least one infant death, the province released no clear, timely data to clinicians or the public. Heavily redacted records confirmed officials were actually tracking these harms while debating whether—and how—to report them.