Opinion: Anti-vax for Spot and Rover

Opinion

It’s the kind of misinformation that eventually kills, and it’s mind-boggling in its stupidity.

A significant percentage of U.S. pet owners are starting to question if they need to vaccinate their dogs — including for rabies. They’ve reached that point for a variety of reasons — none of which bode well for pets, or, for that matter, for everyone else.

The information comes from a recently published scientific study that examined a phenomenon called canine vaccine hesitancy.

You can read the whole study if you like: it’s titled Sick as a dog? The prevalence, politicization, and health policy consequences of canine vaccine hesitancy, and it’s published in the scientific journal Vaccine. (You’ll have to pay to read the whole thing — unlike Bob from Scranton’s latest Facebook screed, there’s a paywall, because, well, you get what you pay for.)

Some caveats: the sample size is not massive, 2,200 American dog owners, but the study’s authors argue that the company they used to do the work is able to match official U.S. Census demographic models, making the sample representative of the general population.

Also, the numbers aren’t quite as strong as strident news reports make them out to be.

Headlines like “Majority of U.S. dog owners now skeptical of vaccines, including for rabies: study” which appeared in The Hill, are technically accurate, but still misleading.

As the study’s authors point out, “(A) large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37 per cent), ineffective (22 per cent), and/or unnecessary (30 per cent). A slight majority of dog owners (53 per cent) endorse at least one of these three positions.”

The italics are the authors’ own.

In other words, most dog owners have some form of concern about the vaccines that are recommended — or are legally required —for their pets.

The study is alarming, though, for a simple reason.

The study’s authors point out that there is a real risk that those doubts about vaccines might crystallize into decisions not to vaccinate pet dogs, even against clear dangers like rabies.

And that’s a problem: almost 59,000 people still die annually from infections from rabid animals, primarily rabid dogs. (Very few die in the United States and Canada right now, because there is widespread pet vaccination against the disease.)

By the time rabies symptoms appear in someone who’s been bitten by a rabid animal, it’s generally too late for treatment. And rabies is a remarkably unpleasant and frightening way to die.

The impact of pet vaccinations on rabies is remarkable: 90 per cent of reported rabies cases in the U.S. now are found in wild animals, primarily bats. Prior to 1960, the U.S. Center for Disease Control points out, the majority of cases were found in domestic dogs. Then, along came rabies vaccinations for pets. The evidence of rabies vaccine effectiveness is striking, clear and undisputed. The numbers just don’t lie.

And still…

The study’s authors point out that the doubts about pet vaccinations are likely, in part, an offshoot of the general vaccine hesitancy that’s arisen with COVID vaccines. Anti-vaxxers, it seems, are not discriminatory when it comes to which vaccines they discount.

The mashup of bad information revealed by the study goes still further: a significant number of those sampled were wary of pet vaccines, rooted in an odd and unsupported theory that the vaccinations could result in some canine form of autism — showing the still-huge impact of entirely debunked claims that human vaccinations were causing autism in children.

Bad information from bad sources could fuel bad decisions about pet vaccination, and lead to health concerns right out of the 1800s, when rabies was at its height.

The mind boggles.