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. … Increasingly, pet owners insisted on spacing out shots or refused vaccines altogether, including for deadly and incurable viruses like rabies.
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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.
But antipathy toward vaccines is also spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some people hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
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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.
