You knew this would be a thing.
In the four years since she opened her own veterinary practice, Dr. Kelly McGuire has seen her fair share of heartbreaking cases.
There was the dog whose kidneys shut down after it contracted leptospirosis, a bacterial disease often carried by rodents. Several of her canine patients had come down with such severe cases of parvovirus that they died after “sloughing their guts to the point of dehydration and malnutrition,” said Dr. McGuire, who owns Wildflower Veterinary Hospital in Brighton, Colo. And, after she was unable to rule out rabies, she had been forced to euthanize a 20-week-old puppy that was having seizures.
The deaths were wrenching, especially because they were preventable: Those pets would likely have survived had they received all their recommended vaccines.
For most of her career, vaccination was a routine, unremarkable part of Dr. McGuire’s work as a small animal veterinarian. But after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she found herself having long, sometimes adversarial discussions with pet owners about the safety and necessity of vaccines. Clients accused her of pushing the vaccines to line her own pockets. And, increasingly, pet owners insisted on spacing out shots or refused vaccines altogether, including for deadly and incurable viruses like rabies.
“I actually had someone scream and yell at us and storm out because we required rabies vaccines for her cats,” Dr. McGuire said, adding that the owner had accused her of trying to “kill her cats with vaccines.”
Over the last several years, the anti-vaccine movement has gained ground in the United States, fueled, in part, by the politicization of the Covid-19 vaccines and the increasing power of vaccine critics like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Childhood vaccination rates have fallen. Once vanquished diseases, like measles, have come storming back. And vaccine mandates are under fire: Last month, Florida announced plans to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren.
But antipathy toward vaccines is also spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some people hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
“I talk to thousands of veterinarians every year across the country, and the majority are seeing this kind of issue,” said Dr. Richard Ford, an emeritus professor at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine who helped write the national vaccine guidelines for cats and dogs.
The phenomenon has clear parallels to the anti-vaccine movement in human medicine and could, experts fear, lead the nation down a familiar path, resulting in a loosening of animal vaccination laws, a decline in pet vaccination rates and a resurgence of infectious diseases that pose a risk to both pets and people.
“Are we going to start undoing mandates for rabies vaccinations?” said Simon Haeder, a health services and policy researcher at the Ohio State University who has studied veterinary vaccine hesitancy. “We’re kind of at a pivotal time here.”
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There is no centralized database of pet vaccination rates in the United States, and it remains unclear whether they have fallen in recent years. “We have a real data issue,” said Dr. Audrey Ruple, a veterinary epidemiologist at Virginia Tech. But, she said, “we will definitely know when disease starts to break through.”
Declining pet vaccination rates would not be a threat to animal health alone; several vaccine-preventable illnesses, including leptospirosis and rabies, can spread from pets to people. “Dogs are sharing our beds with us now,” said Dr. Steve Weinrauch, chief veterinary officer at Trupanion, a pet insurance company. “They’re kissing our children’s faces.”
Indeed, before health agencies launched mass-vaccination campaigns for pets in the mid-20th century, bites from rabid dogs caused most human rabies cases in the United States.
Most states require dogs to get rabies vaccines, but not all states do, and some mandates are stricter than others. With vaccine antipathy on the rise, Dr. Motta worries that officials may see a political advantage in rolling back these requirements.
“As we’ve seen very much over the past couple of months, health policy is dynamic,” Dr. Motta said. “It is subject to political motivations and orientations. It is a reflection of public opinion.”
Dr. Ford said he was encouraging vets to to get ahead of the problem: If they have learned anything from what has unfolded in human public health, it’s that dismissing concerns about vaccines does not make those concerns go away.
“There’s this mentality among some physicians and veterinarians to say, Get over it, just get the vaccine,” he said. “We’re trying to convince veterinarians to take these concerns seriously.”
This is not a brand-new thing – the story cites survey data from 2023 that shows a distressingly high rate of vaccine skepticism among pet owners. The idea that dogs and cats could get a form of autism as a result of being vaccinated (spoiler alert: there’s no such thing) is now out there. I for one won’t be surprised when there’s a pet owner’s “bill of rights” introduced in a forthcoming legislative session. Now you know. Wonkette and Slate have more.
Time to re-release “Old Yeller”.