More dog owners are questioning vaccines like rabies after COVID
More dog owners are questioning vaccines like rabies after COVID
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.
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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 the loud ones sit down and shut up first
My country? I'm Canadian.
Granted, we're ten years behind the US at most.
You can't make someone learn when they're determined to remain ignorant. So no.
Problem is our country tells each of our 50 states to do the education thing... so that leads to a huge range of outcomes for the unlucky students born into the wrong state.