Propaganda About Rabies Vaccine Deaths

Anti-vaccine influencers don't even want you to get rabies vaccines!

Believe it or not, anti-vaccine influencers even try to scare people away from getting vaccinated and protected against rabies!

Good thing that his parents don’t listen to anti-vaccine influencers!

Fortunately, most folks don’t listen to them!

Propaganda About Rabies Vaccine Deaths

Rabies is a terrible disease.

And it is easily prevented with the safe and effective rabies post-exposure prophylaxis, which includes a series of four rabies vaccines.

Rabies vaccines work!

But that doesn’t keep anti-vaccine influencers from trying to make you think that rabies vaccines don’t work.

Most vaccinated animals who are exposed to rabies do not develop rabies!

Or that rabies vaccines are more dangerous and riskier than getting rabies!

More than half of the nine ‘vaccine deaths’ in VAERS for the rabies vaccine are not true vaccine deaths. And about 60,000 people get rabies post-exposure prophylaxis each year, which includes four doses of rabies vaccines over two weeks. So that’s 240,000 doses of the rabies vaccine each year.

How do they try to do that?

Abusing VAERS Rabies Vaccine Reports

As usual, they abuse VAERS reports.

However, you should know that there have been only nine reports in VAERS that resulted in death for the rabies vaccine since 1990.

So, about 1 death (in VAERS) every 4 years, during which time nearly one million rabies vaccines will be given!

But, not surprisingly, that’s not the whole story.

At least three of the reports are of people died because they had rabies!

“The patient had been bitten by a bat on the left ear four to six weeks prior to symptom onset. The patient had a history of chronic neck and back pain that occasionally featured numbness. Three days prior to the event, the patient had a history of pruritus on his left ear, face and arm (19/nov/2008), mild chest pain (21/Nov/2008), and panic attacks and anxiety associated with swallowing water (22/Nov/2008).”

Details for VAERS ID: 0368648-1

And while they may have received one or more rabies vaccines after exposure, it was either too late to prevent them from developing rabies or they didn’t complete their schedule of rabies vaccines.

And that’s why they died.

Rabies.

Not the rabies vaccine.

These are not vaccine deaths.

Another report (VAERS ID: 0803127-1) is from a case “reported in a literature article and described the occurrence of rabies in a 6-year-old male subject who received Rabies Vaccine for prophylaxis.” The child had been bitten by a rabid dog, supposedly in Georgia, on an “unspecified date between May 2014 and June 2014” and received only one dose of a rabies vaccines and rabies IG. He later died with rabies.

Although a tragic story, it didn’t happen in the United States and shouldn’t be included in VAERS.

How do I know?

No children died with rabies after a dog bite in 2014 in Georgia!

And the study was a “retrospective review of all patients seen at the ten provinces between January 1, 2014-December 31, 2016.”

“Given the suboptimal completion rates found in this study, we investigated whether any of the patients from our study died due to lack of adherence. Using rabies case report forms from the national rabies surveillance system, we found two instances of documented rabies mortality of patients involved in this study. The first patient, a six-year-old boy living in Son La Province, was bitten on the head area (category 3 exposure) by a sick dog with an unknown rabies vaccination history in May 2014. He received eRIG and one dose of vaccine two days after his exposure. He subsequently died in June 2014, about 6 days after the onset of symptoms.”

Rabies post-exposure prophylaxis initiation and adherence among patients in Vietnam, 2014–2016

A study done in Vietnam!

Yet another report was of a 37-year-old man who received a rabies vaccine after being bitten by a sick bat. The man with chronic alcoholism, fatty liver changes, and Mallory Weiss syndrome developed continuous vomiting five days later and died, so not a vaccine death.

Another VAERS report we looked at under rabies vaccine deaths describe a 45-year-old woman who got sick nine days after she received a rabies vaccine.

This is not a vaccine death…

The cause of death two days later was the “the poisonous effect of ingested food stuff causing an acute systemic anaphylactic response which led to acute myocardial failure & ended in cardo-respiratory arrest.”

She died because of a food allergy — not a vaccine death.

Vaccine Deaths vs. Rabies Deaths

So most of the nine “vaccine deaths” in VAERS since 1990 for the rabies vaccine were not actually caused by the rabies vaccine.

And we are down to maybe four deaths since 1990, or one death every nine years, during which time over 2 million doses of rabies vaccines will be given. I say maybe, because it is hard to tell if 1 in a million type reactions are actually caused by a vaccine.

Rabies vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary.

They prevent hundreds of rabies deaths in the United States each year.

“Rabies is 100% preventable. In the U.S. and many European countries, a dog bite rarely leads to death. But in many countries, even a superficial dog bite or scratch can lead to a disease that is nearly 100% fatal once symptoms manifest.

Rabies is one of the world’s oldest diseases, but remains a daily threat to millions around the world.”

End Rabies Now

And rabies is a horrible way to die.

Don’t let anti-vaccine influencers get in the way of ending rabies in the world.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Human rabies - Missouri, 2008. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2009 Nov 6;58(43):1207-9. PMID: 19893481.

Tran CH, Afriyie DO, Pham TN, Otsu S, Urabe M, Dang AD, Tran HGT, Nguyen HV, Le HT, Nguyen HTT. Rabies post-exposure prophylaxis initiation and adherence among patients in Vietnam, 2014-2016. Vaccine. 2019 Oct 3;37 Suppl 1:A54-A63. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.01.030. Epub 2019 Feb 2. PMID: 30723063.

Murray KO, Holmes KC, Hanlon CA. Rabies in vaccinated dogs and cats in the United States, 1997-2001. J Am Vet Med Assoc. 2009 Sep 15;235(6):691-5. doi: 10.2460/javma.235.6.691. PMID: 19751164.

Rabies Post-exposure Prophylaxis https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/hcp/prevention-recommendations/post-exposure-prophylaxis.html

Vaidya SA, Manning SE, Dhankhar P, Meltzer MI, Rupprecht C, Hull HF, Fishbein DB. Estimating the risk of rabies transmission to humans in the U.S.: a Delphi analysis. BMC Public Health. 2010 May 26;10:278. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-10-278. PMID: 20500896; PMCID: PMC2887820.