On January 7, 2015, California health officials announced that an international visitor to the state’s iconic Disneyland theme park had been linked to at least seven cases of measles, in addition to two likely cases in Utah. Two days later, five more California residents received confirmations of positive diagnoses; and over the next several weeks, clusters of new cases cropped up across the U.S., each generating waves of news headlines, collective hand-wringing and political debate. By early February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 140 connected measles cases had been identified across more than a dozen U.S. states. The outbreak would eventually spread to Mexico and then Canada, where it set off a separate cluster of infections leading to more than 130 cases in the Lanaudière region near Montreal.
This paper examines Canadian media coverage of the Disneyland outbreak as a case for understanding how health risk events are translated from conditions into problems that magnify moral and political concerns. If, as Gerlach and Hamilton (2014) argue, pandemic culture is shaped by “the stories we tell about our vulnerability,” media coverage provides necessary grist for how we experience, understand, make sense of and imagine our collective vulnerability to infection and disease. In particular, we examine the major narratives of the outbreak, discuss how parents who reject or express worries about vaccination were depicted, and trace which solutions were presented to address the problem of vaccine preventable disease. Our objective is not to identify the effects of media coverage on individual or collective decision-making about risk, but to account for how outbreak narratives inform the constitution and circulation of public understandings of vaccination and disease risk.