Vaccine skepticism has spread to our pets.

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.

  • @m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    16•10 months ago

    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)