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…
I said the exact same thing. People are stupid.
Welp, looks like rabies is gonna have a huge comeback.
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.
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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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 can. 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
Smallpox can never return. It is gone forever
It’s extinct in the wild. It’s still frozen in labs, and the soviet union made it in vast quantities before falling apart. There’s also samples sitting around that are occasionally found.
It’s not completely gone. That’s why they still vaccinate you for it when you join the military.
A simple search would tell you that there is a great deal of controversy over the fact that this virus is not gone forever.
Try to be better and not amplify false statements.
I don’t think that anyone plans on releasing smallpox from labs. That wouldn’t benefit anyone.
Who said anything about planning?
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.
As the disease progresses, the person may experience delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, hydrophobia (fear of water), and insomnia. The acute period of disease typically ends after 2 to 10 days. Once clinical signs of rabies appear, the disease is nearly always fatal,
I believe the current survival rate is 29 people ever.
Only 5 of whom had no long-term damage.
Sauce. It’s a bit old at 2020 though so there are probably a few more.
It’s a bit old at 2020 though so there are probably a few more.
Well the average is 1 survivor every 167 years, so I’d say that’s charitable.
Well the average is 1 survivor every 167 years, so I’d say that’s charitable.
This is nonsense lmfao. Why you even said this after I linked a literal study about the surviving cases is beyond me.
30 survivors in 5000 years = 1/167. Apparently it’s about 4000 years, so 1/133. My bad.
Do you believe the earth is 5000 years old or something?
The first unvaccinated person to live from rabies was in 2004 due to the Milwaukee Protocol.
2023 - 2004 = 19. 29/19 = 1.53 survivors per year.
I feel sorry for the dogs that will suffer because of this nonsense.
At least they won’t be autistic.
I hear it turns dogs gay or something
And magnetic. You don’t want a magnetic dog.
Sure as hell do. Shoe-in for frisbee throwing champs.
Yeah, but then they go in the kitchen and get near the knives. Then you have a knife dog.
have their own identity, they’ll sniff and hump anything
Mine has dogtism.
No, that is Attention Deficit Hyperactive Dog (ADHD)
I feel sorry for the humans that will suffer from incurable diseases like rabies because of this nonsense.
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.
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.
…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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On the plus side, some of those owners are bound to be bitten.
Updates on Rabies virus disease: is evolution toward “Zombie virus” a tangible threat?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7975959/
The irony of brain dead anti vaxxers becoming zombies
Any evolution or opportunity for it through any spread, especially in human adjacent vectors, is super bad news. A respiratory communicable rabies would be a potential “doomsday virus”. We really don’t want rabies picking up any new tricks.
I mean… they kinda already are.
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 and might not get them a rabies shot in time to save their own 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.
28 days later…
Not enough.
Sometimes I really hate it here
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?
Killing your dog to own the libs
I give it 7 years before we hear a story about a rash of children getting rabies and dying probably somewhere in the southeast or Midwest from a rabies outbreak.
Florida.
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 one the wall and make fun of you. You should leave town, and then go another mile away, and I get each other.
Savage.
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.
As an autistic, a dog lover and a science guy… I feel so fucking conflicted.
Like, statistically speaking dogs are more likely to bite their owners, making rabies lethal for both the dog and the common sense challenged owners; I’m willing to let the humans die, however the dog is still innocent.
Anyway, I just wish every single conspiracy theorist anti vaccine person gets a very treatable and preventable (via vaccine) disease+infection; no sympathy from me.
I’m not. As much as I have no sympathy for shitty dog owners, chances are shitty dog owners are gonna keep from doing anything enough that someone innocent may get bit and unknowingly get rabies. That and shitty dog owners seem likely to simply lie about having given a rabies vaccine to their puppers. Literally I want anything and everything to help prevent innocent people (and other dogs) from getting rabies. It’s so fucking awful. Even if that includes saving some people from leaving the gene pool that might not deserve to be there.
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.
The article does not link the study. It can be found linked from the authors site (https://www.mattmotta.com/publications) here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qmbkv/
Honestly, it’s more worth reading than the article. It’s 7 pages, not including references and data.
I was wondering who the 2,200 people were. From the study:
Data
Data for this study are derived from a nationally representative online survey of N = 2,200 US adults, conducted between March 30 - April 10, 2023. We administered this study in partnership with YouGov… …YouGov did this for our study by first pulling a simple random sample of responses from nationally representative US Census data, …These individuals were then invited to participate in our study.
The firm then corrected for any remaining deviations … on the basis of respondents’ racial identity, gender identity, age, educational attainment, and 2020 US Presidential vote choice.
Stage 1 Results: The Prevalence and Politicization of CVH
We begin our analysis by considering the prevalence of CVH among dog owners. As Table 3 demonstrates, a large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37%), ineffective (22%), and/or unnecessary (30%). Correspondingly, we find that a slight majority of dog owners (53%) can be considered to be vaccine hesitant; i.e., because they endorse at least one of these three positions (see: Measures)
US adults
Can you please start educating your country
someone has to make then sit down and shut up first
My country? I’m Canadian.
You can’t make someone learn when they’re determined to remain ignorant. So no.
