It has come to this: the opponents of vaccination are now targeting your dog

We’ve been dealing with COVID for three years now, and not only are people still arguing about vaccines for the disease, but the anti-vaccination sentiment that seemed to flourish when the COVID vaccine became available in 2021 has now spread across the United States. pollinated and brought to the veterinary clinic. A Study just published in the journal VaccinePart of the ScienceDirect network, showed that more than half of American respondents now have questions about their dogs’ vaccinations – even against rabies.

Conducted in partnership with YouGov, the polling company, the vaccination study surveyed 2,200 Americans between March 30 and April 10 this year and found that 53 percent of respondents expressed some “hesitation” about vaccinating their dogs, like the study it called. This is a bigger problem than you think. According to Frontiers in Veterinary Science magazine, 99 percent of all rabies cases worldwide are transmitted by pet dogs. Worse still, rabies is almost always fatal once a dog or human shows symptoms. It’s a malignant disease; Vaccinating dogs is the best way to control this. With those numbers, you’d think vaccinations for dogs would be a hit, right?

think again

According to the Vaccine/YouGov poll, large segments of the American population believe that dog vaccines are unsafe (37 percent), ineffective (22 percent), or unnecessary (30 percent). According to the study “A narrow majority of dog owners (53 percent) support at least one of these three positions.”

Where the hell did that come from, you might ask? According to Bloomberg, “Nearly 40 percent feared vaccines could cause dogs to develop autism, a theory without any scientific basis.” Sounds familiar? We have a potential presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spouting this nonsense People for a few decades. That the same false theory has now found its way into the veterinary practice shows you how far we have fallen as a nation when it comes to caring not only for ourselves and our children but even for our pets.

Dogs are like children in the sense that they have no say in their health. Dogs don’t require you to put them in the car and drive to the vet to get vaccinated against rabies or parvovirus, diseases that can kill dogs or cats. Nor do you ask your children to vaccinate them against measles, mumps and rubella, polio or whooping cough. We take… or maybe I should say took…this stuff was taken for granted for so long, the whole pediatric vaccine thing just fell off the radar, at least until COVID, when paranoid right-wing lunatics and certain people with the surname “Kennedy” started banging the discredited drum that somehow offering pediatric vaccines does more harm as useful.

Let’s take a look at whooping cough as an example. I’m old enough to be alive when whooping cough was spread in schools, as they used to say. If you live close together, you can hear children screaming through the walls as you climb the stairs to your apartment, which is a very good word to describe the first symptoms of the disease. Children used to make this strange gasp accompanied by a violent inhalation, which was the cause Oops Sound. The disease was easily communicable and I remember schools being closed when there was a major outbreak.

Why? A quarter of the children contracted pneumonia, a disease that could be deadly even after the discovery of antibiotics like penicillin. I remember seeing photos of a ward in a hospital where ten children were lying on beds under large oxygen tents, coughing and wheezing. Some children got convulsions and trembled uncontrollably. Many children suffered from apnea, which resulted in not getting a good night’s sleep or even waking up suddenly and unable to breathe.

And then there was polio, the most terrible disease of all when I was a kid. For the first four years of my schooling, in every class I was in there was at least one child who walked on crutches, was bent over from the debilitating effects of the disease, or was in a wheelchair. LIFE magazine featured chilling photos of basketball court-sized hospital wards full of iron-lunged children tended to by nurses in starched uniforms. In 1954, while I was in the second grade of an elementary school in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, there was an outbreak of polio. 80 children contracted polio within the first two months of the school year. It was the army, of course, and it was a time when parents didn’t pull their children out of school and the schools themselves weren’t closed because of an outbreak of disease, not even polio. Instead, they lined us up in the hallways and gave us shots of gamma globulin to boost our immune systems. The stuff was the consistency of motor oil and was administered with a needle about four inches long. I can still remember standing in my school hallway and listening through the door to the screaming children as the injections were administered.

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By the time the first trial of the Salk vaccine began in 1954, the polio outbreak at Fort Leavenworth had gotten so bad that the placebo was dropped from the test and we were all just given the Salk vaccine shot. It stopped the outbreak, but for years I had nightmares about the gamma globulin shots.

It is often forgotten how extraordinary it is that medicine was able to find ways to immunize us against these brutal childhood diseases. At least, that’s what I did until 2004, when I was in Afghanistan as a reporter and traveled to Asadabad, an outlaw town on the Afghan-Pakistani border in the foothills of the Himalayas. Taliban control of the surrounding area on both sides of the border had prevented NGOs from setting up health clinics and vaccinating the local population. So polio was rampant in mountain villages and when you drove to Asadabad you could see the effects right on the road. Children hobbled by on crutches made out of “Y” shaped branches cut to fit their tiny bodies. Old men begging for alms would push their way along dirt roads on planks with wheels from shopping carts, chunks of wood in hand. There were also no antibiotics, so staph infections were common – little girls had oozing sores on their legs and boys with pus-filled open sores on their necks.

We take things for granted about our own health until an illness like COVID wipes us out. It was only two years ago that so many of our fellow citizens stood in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals, too busy to handle the bodies being carried from emergency rooms and intensive care units.

Even as those memories fade, we’ll be reminded again of human folly when a new study comes out like the one that shows the anti-vaccination craze has now extended to veterinary services.

I didn’t have a column in the salon two Saturdays ago because my wife Tracy and I had had mild cases of COVID despite being triple vaccinated and double vaccinated. I’ve been looking at the numbers showing a so-called “surge” in COVID cases across the country. In my state of Pennsylvania, hospital admissions are up 19 percent in the last two weeks. During the same period, the number of COVID deaths increased by 45 percent. Nationwide, COVID hospitalizations are up 31 percent and deaths are up 32 percent in the past two weeks.

Vaccination rates and the spread of at least two new COVID variants show why this surge is happening. Nationwide, the rate of initial vaccinations against COVID is 69 percent overall and 94 percent among those over 65 years of age. But the rate for bivalent booster shots — which work against a variant of the disease that’s now at least a year old — is 17 percent in the overall US population and 43 percent among those age 65 and older. Tracy and I contracted the disease even though our upper arms now look like pincushions. But it’s pretty clear that those who are unvaccinated or minimally vaccinated are contributing to the so-called increase in both hospital admissions and deaths.

So don’t listen to Kennedy and the angry maniacs who are still out there screaming that more people are dying from the vaccine than from the disease itself. You’re wrong, of course. So please listen to your veterinarian when he or she tells you it’s time to get your dog or cat vaccinated against rabies. You don’t want to die, and neither do your animals. As always, what stands between you and them and a slew of diseases that can put you both in the hospital and cost you real money, not to mention your life, just like the ones that have saved lives all over the globe since 75 years. Don’t hesitate. Do it.