More than half of dog owners are suspicious of rabies and other vaccines, new study finds

A new wave of vaccine suspicion has extended to our pets, a new study found.

Published Sunday in the journal Vaccine, the study surveyed 2,200 people on their opinions regarding routine vaccinations given to pet dogs, specifically rabies vaccines.

Of those polled, 37% believe canine vaccination is unsafe, 22% feel it's ineffective and 30% find it unnecessary. Overall, a whopping 53% hold at least one of these beliefs.

The results surprised Matt and Gabriella Motta, the brother-sister duo who conducted the study alongside co-researcher Dominik Stecula.

“We were pretty surprised because we knew that this phenomenon would exist, anecdotally we had good reason to believe that it was, but we were pretty stunned,” Matt Motta, a political scientist and researcher at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told USA TODAY. “The sheer volume of people who hold these opinions was quite striking…that, to me, is pretty alarming.”

The study also found the persistence of long-disproven vaccine myths that usually apply to humans, with nearly 40% of respondents expressing concern that vaccines could cause their dogs to develop autism.

“I believe the COVID-19 vaccine has fundamentally changed the way that Americans view vaccination in general,” said Motta. “I think alarmingly that could be spilling over to shape how people feel about attitude toward vaccinating their pets and frankly, who knows what else? You know, it could go even further.”

Dangers of rabies:Rabid bats sparked a public health warning in Illinois: Why rabies is dangerous to humans, pets

A veterinarian’s perspective

Gabriella Motta, a board-certified veterinarian, said she believes the hesitancy comes not only from pet owners’ love for their dogs, but a lack of experience with the illnesses routine vaccines protect against.

“I think when owners are questioning the vaccine, they're coming from a place where they truly care about their dogs and they don't want their dogs to be a guinea pig or, you know, get something that they don't need, that could potentially cause a side effect,” she told USA TODAY.

“People kind of forget, you know, how bad [rabies] actually can be, so there’s a lot of the question of, well, why does my pet need to be vaccinated?” she said. “I know my neighbor's dog had cancer or this infection, but I don't know anyone whose dog has ever had rabies…keeping so many members of a population vaccinated, we don't experience what other countries do where rabies is a legitimate fear that people have.”

While every medical treatment comes with some level of risk, she said, it’s about weighing the potential for side effects versus the cost. The cost of forgoing vaccination can be high, she said, as rabies is almost always fatal.

Many people also fall victim to anecdotal bias, which leads them to believe vaccination is unnecessary because a dog they’ve known in their life went without and were “perfectly fine.”

“That’s a discussion we have a lot,” she said “explaining that, like with anything, if we stop vaccinating, just like with measles, we start to see diseases that we didn't have before come back. That’s kind of the biggest myth that people are facing, we've been protected for so long that it's hard to think about it coming back.”

Both of the study authors agree that, if these attitudes persist or spread and result in fewer pets being vaccinated, a public health crisis could soon ensue, especially since rabies is transmittable not only to other animals but humans as well.

A public health crisis in the making

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), dogs are the main carriers and transmitters of the disease, causing 99% of human rabies deaths. Rabies transmitted to humans by dogs result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally every year.

However, due to wide-spread laws mandating that dog owners vaccinate their canines against rabies, only 60 to 70 dogs are reported rabid each year in the U.S., according to the CDC.

Because rabies is easily transmitted to our domestic animals from wildlife and then to us from our domestic animals via bite, a decrease in rabies vaccinations could have serious ramifications.

“I run in a park in Boston every morning and I come across dogs that are off a leash all the time,” said Matt Motta “And yes, some of them do try to nip at my ankles from time to time, and in a world where every dog is vaccinated, I don’t have to worry about that. But if they're not, that's something I have to think about. And so, I think the public health consequences are underappreciated.”

And, as there is no centralized means of collecting data regarding pet vaccination and no real treatment once symptoms appear, the consequences could sneak up on us.

Dog pneumonia:Is there an outbreak of pneumonia in dogs? Here's what you and your pup should know.

Changing attitudes towards vaccines

While a lot of demographic information was taken into account for the study, the authors found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that those who are skeptical of vaccination in humans are those more likely to be hesitant in vaccinating their dogs.

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) issued a “red alert” situation surrounding a drop in routine childhood vaccines earlier this year, and organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and American Medical Association have reported a sharp and persistent decrease in childhood vaccinations since the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the highly politicized environment surrounding public health during COVID led to increased skepticism from the public as to the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines, so too has it encouraged suspicion of long-routine preventatives for our furry friends.

“If you had told me before the COVID-19 pandemic that MMR vaccine mandates for kids enrolling in public schools would become a source of major political controversy, I would have thought that that was a bit farfetched,” said Matt Motta. “Yet, that’s what has happened.”

The potential solution, he said, lies in ensuring people have access to sound information about vaccination and restoring Americans’ faith in medical science and vaccine efficacy.

“It’s a relatively simple one, but it's very hard to do,” Motta shared. “The solution, I think, is that we need to restore Americans’ trust in vaccines and the people who produce them and then the people who administer them, we need to increase Americans trust in science and vaccine science. That's a relatively simple thing to say, right? But how is it that we actually do it?”

That is something experts are trying to figure out, he said. Positive messaging coming from people Americans do trust, such as politicians from the party they identify with, is one scalable strategy he sees working.  

“We're a nation of vaccine skeptics to some degree, but we're all vaccine skeptical for different reasons,” he said. “We need a patchwork of communication, efforts to understand the many reasons why people are vaccine hesitant and then appeal to each one in a targeted way."

“If we can make more trust in human vaccines, I think we can restore trust in canine vaccines too.”