More than half of U.S. dog owners expressed concerns about vaccinating their dogs, including against rabies, according to a new study published Saturday in the journal Vaccine. The study comes as anti-vaccine sentiments among humans have exploded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pets are now often considered to be a member of the family, and their health-care decisions are weighed with the same gravity. But the consequences of not vaccinating animals can be just as dire as humans. Dogs, for example, are responsible for 99% of rabies cases globally. Rabies, which is often transmitted via a bite, is almost always fatal for animals and people once clinical signs appear. A drop in rabies vaccination could constitute a serious public health threat.
In the new study, the authors surveyed 2,200 people and found 53% had some concern about the safety, efficacy or necessity of canine vaccines. Nearly 40% were concerned that vaccines could cause dogs to develop autism, a theory without any scientific merit.
Oh for fuck’s sake…
Welp, looks like rabies is gonna have a huge comeback. I bet there’s a huge overlap with antivaxx owners and unleashed pets too.
It’s really sad too.
One interpretation of the cause of this problem is that vaccines are just too effective. No one has polio, not to mention even chicken pox.
A resurgence of rabies (or, god forbid, small pox) will clear that up real quick.
Then again, too much of this planet have been fed a steady diet of propaganda for most of their adult lives.
I literally saw lady letting fucking hellspawn of a child COVERED IN CHICKEN POX run around barefoot at Aldi a few weeks ago. I was so panicked I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t even see them until I was walking out so I just got out as fast as I could. My wife has never had chickenpox, and adult chickenpox can apparently be much more deadly, so it was definitely kind of terrifying.
Get the damn vaccine.
I’ll have to check to see if she’s gotten it. I can’t imagine she’s gone this long without getting chickenpox and not being vaccinated for it, but I don’t think the chickenpox vaccine was as widely known of when we were kids in the 90s.
There’s an adult vaccine, get it and fear not: https://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/chickenpox-varicella-vaccine-guidelines-for-adults
Ahem.
Fwiw the last big smallpox outbreak was in 1962.
And? All that needs to happen for a major world outbreak now that almost no one has any immunity is for it to escape from a lab or a vial in cardboard box somewhere.
How many millions died from COVID? Try billions.
Let me tell you what, that would sure reduce our carbon footprint and the price of housing.
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Cats too. I hate that people let cats roam, it’s irresponsible and shitty to just let your pet out to do whatever it wants with everyone else’s property. And now there are gonna be unvaccinated, rabid cats roaming and infecting it further.
Hey maybe the apocalypse is coming and this is the start of a zombie/aggressive rabies outbreak!
I’d let my cat out if I had one. They deserve to explore and be happy
They die much younger on average if you do that.
True that.
They deserve to explore and be happy
Do they deserve to explore and suffer horrible injuries and/or death? All the while decimating local bird populations, and, if not spayed or neutered, creating more kittens to live lives full of suffering and hardship?
Yep
Good thing you don’t have cats then, sounds like you’d be an irresponsible owner.
I thought you would love to know… haha, we are e now irresponsible cat owners. ;)
Why would I like to know that you’re proud of potentially causing suffering to your pets and other animals?
Even just today I had to rescue a kitten who had been yelling for hours near my house because their owners let them outside. At least she was microchipped so we could find them easily, but she was not happy about it at all. Came running after me as soon as she saw me, and ran inside the house when I opened the kitchen door.
If you say so friend.
Can you imagine if dog people just opened their doors at night, let their dogs fuck off to wreck property, kill pets, get killed themselves, and destroy native birds and animals? They’d rightly be called out and have their pets taken away. Take care of YOUR pet and keep it on YOUR property. I’ve had issues with neighbor cats causing damages to my property, and if your pet becomes my pest, I will treat it as such.
I remember a neighbor’s cat once almost tore through my window screen to get at my pet parrot. If that cat had made it inside my house and attacked my pet, he would not have made it out alive.
Dogs and cats are not the same. And that sucks.
I’m also glad I don’t know you and I bet that is mutual. We can celebrate this non-familularity.
cocks shotgun not if I can help it
I feel sorry for the dogs that will suffer because of this nonsense.
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Mine has dogtism.
No, that is Attention Deficit Hyperactive Dog (ADHD)
You’re going to deny them all that 5G coursing through their veins? Think of the speed increase!
Babe wake up, 6G vaccines just dropped
I feel sorry for the humans that will suffer from incurable diseases like rabies because of this nonsense.
The truly ironic thing is that the fact that vaccines worked so well at eliminating so many horrible diseases is why these chuckle fucks don’t think that they need vaccines.
If they never saw a loved one killed or permanently fucked up from disease it must not exist or it’s no a big deal. They are completely oblivious to the fact that vaccines are the reason why they never saw the suffering and death first hand.
The sentiment is different now though around becoming unwell with one of these diseases. They’ll argue they caught it from vaccine shedding rather than naturally so it will just make them even more psychotic on the antivax soapbox.
Andrew Wakefield has a lot to answer for by rocket powering our regression in modern medicine.
Yeah, I feel like anyone who denies a vaccine should be forced to watch a graphic video about people who suffer the effects of measles, mumps, reubella or rabies or whatever they are wanting to deny and then can make their choice if they want that, or to believe a Baywatch star regurgitate nonsense
Unfortunately, Herman Caine awards are a thing. There were plenty of honorable mentions where the person caught COVID, went through a long, expensive, and arduous recovery, and they are still staunchly anti-vax. The damage the far right media has done to the world will take at least a generation of aggressive countermeasures to correct.
Oh, but if this goes on they’ll definitely see the effects.
If you don’t vaccinate your pet, you should be disallowed from owning it
And then they should be spayed or neutered, for responsible population control.
People who don’t spay or neuter their pets piss me off. We don’t need more dogs in the world. More dogs means more of them suffer through neglect and abuse. We need fewer dogs and better owners.
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I think it might even be more true for cats than for dogs. I’ve seen a lot more stray cats than stray dogs anyway.
I believe you mean to spay or neuter the animal, right? Not the pet, but the animal who prevented the pet from receiving the vaccine.
That is literally the law where I am, an most cities I thought. Dogs are required to have a rabies vaccine.
That is only enforced if you register your dog with the city. It’s required by law to register your pet and pay a yearly fee, plus show vaccination records. But it is only enforced if the police stop you for some reason while you are with your dog and they happen to ask about your dog’s registration. If you only walk you dog on leash and never take it anywhere that a cop might talk to you, nobody would ever know your dog wasn’t registered. If you never take your dog to daycare while you are on vacation, nobody would ever know your dog didn’t have vaccinations.
The local dog warden will do rounds in neighborhoods in my area to check for dog registrations and rabies tags
…is almost always fatal for animals and people…
That’s an understatement. I think there are only one or two documented cases ever where someone started to show symptoms of rabies and lived. If I recall correctly those who did live were given massive doses of the vaccine as the moment symptoms were noticed and were mentally incapacitated the rest of their lives.
Not quite, the vaccine is only part of it. The Milwaukee Protocol involves putting the patient into a coma and dropping their body temp so low that the virus can’t spread (should note that low core temps are why marsupials like opossums are damn near immune) because once symptoms are showing it’s actively turning your brain to mush. Between the virus already being present and the coma, brain damage is basically guaranteed despite survival.
Iirc only 29 people recorded as surviving. We should note that rabies has a written record going back to the start of writing. 29, in 4 millennia.
Rabies is scary as fuck y’all. You can get this shit from getting an organ transplant from someone who never knew they were infected after being bitten by a bat while camping last year.
https://youtu.be/kxBIJvNHZg4?si=2MjzGA2caKFIcBcM here’s a video that’s pretty disturbing if you’re wanting to see what dying of rabies looks like. Spoilers, it’s awful.
There’s also a lot of disagreement on if the Milwaukee Protocol works or if it’s something else entirely that we’re just starting to figure out, and if it’s worth the risks of things like lock-in syndrome if it won’t do anything helpful for most people. Radiolab has a pretty interesting episode about it all
You can get this shit from getting an organ transplant from someone who never knew they were infected after being bitten by a bat while camping last year.
Reminds me of my favourite episode of Scrubs
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There is radiolab episode about this, highly recommended. A girl survived who was bitten on her toe by inducing a coma and giving her the vaccine. The idea was that slowed the death march of the rabies to the brain and allowed the body enough time to mount a defense. The treatment had not had a very good success rate.
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Imagine dying a slow and horrible death because Karen didn’t trust the rabies vaccine.
Imagine? It’s fucking happened! Many Karens have died in hospital with ventilators, begging for paxlovid but it was too late.
The surviving Karens then say “See, it wasn’t so bad” or “COVID isn’t real.”
The shape of the Venn diagram about people who don’t vaccinate their dogs, and people who keep their dogs off leash is a circle
I’m fine with Karens dying from their own stupidity just don’t make it anyone else’s problem.
On the plus side, some of those owners are bound to be bitten.
Sure, but with the much bigger minus that rabid dogs are also likely to bite a lot of perfectly innocent people, particularly kids, and even more particularly, kids who have crazy anti-vaxxer parents that might not get them a (human) rabies shot in time to save their life after a dog bite.
(note how many kids die of self-inflected gunshot wounds because their parents are too stupid to keep them safe from those)
As a kid I remember a rabid dog confronting me in an alley. A cop showed up an shot him dead. You might think I would be traumatized, but actually thought it was kind of cool.
Not enough.
28 days later…
I’ve recently encountered a cat rescue that rehomes their feral cats without giving them their rabies vaccines and NOT disclosing this. Ask me how I know and am 11 needles deep…they asked me to lie to public health and maintain that rabies isn’t actually necessary and I wasn’t really put at risk (?!)
It’s fucking ludicrous and public health barely responded.
I am all for saving and rehoming ferals but holy hell VACCINATE AGAINST RABIES. The reason it’s not as prevalent is BECAUSE OF THE VACCINES.
This is awful!
Can you complain further up the chain, at a county or state level?
Sometimes I really hate it here
Oh these dumb assholes.
Shakespeare on it:
“All the contagion of the south light on you. You shames of Rome! You herd of boils and plague. [Let us] plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorr’d! Go, further than seen, and one infect another, against the wind another mile!”
This was about plague and dirty people that wouldn’t stop dumping their shit in the gutter in front of their houses. He says you dirty fucks, herd of plague, were going to post picture of you on the wall and make fun of you. You should leave town, and then go another mile away, and infect each other.
Savage.
I agree with your sentiment, but the quote is from Corolanius. Marcius (a Roman general) is cursing his own men for retreating from an assault upon an enemy city. He’s very upset.
Hmmm, no doubt you’re correct now that I read it in context. I can’t place exactly where I got this notion from and my Google fu is not finding it. It was a piece online somewhere about Shakespearean concepts as to the lives of commoners in his time, including plague, through his works.
Do these people actually want to experience rabies, a disease with 99.9999999999% death rate, for themselves? Well, good luck for them, and natural selection will prevail.
Unfortunately the dog is probably more likely to bite someone else, not a member of the family that refused to vaccinate him.
I pay $10 a year to license my dog. My dog has to be rabies vaccinated to get his license. He’s issued a tag with an ID#. The vet has to report his vaccine info. I get a certificate with a vaccine number too. I suppose I’m fortunate to live in an area with this as a requirement but I think it’s pretty easy to get around this too. I live in a metro area. I suppose in more rural areas, licensing and registration of dogs isn’t the norm.
That’s true I think in most of America but it’s voluntary, basically. You’re supposed to do it but there is no enforcement until your dog gets loose or bites someone and someone asked about your license.
This would be decried as authoritarianism in many part of the US
Meanwhile I was thrilled when my vet got the bunny vaccine, which had to be specially imported under special rules from Europe. And I was even more thrilled that a US made alternative just became available because it doesn’t involve growing live virus in bun buns. Hell no we don’t want RHD2, and IMHO you would have to be insane to withhold that vaccine from your bun buns.
Buns don’t get rabies vaccines but I’m perfectly happy to vaccinate my cat against whatever the vet suggests.
