Oh, is it only 22? (sarcasm)
Interesting side note: my chiropractor has never vaccinated his child for anything. When people find that out, they don't ask "well, hasn't your child contracted a horrible disease that you could have vaccinated against?" The reaction is "how are you going to get him into school?"
And indeed therein lies the rub. There are diseases which you vaccinate individuals to protect them because they might be individually at risk, in pets this would include Lyme and feline leukemia. The diseases are endemic, and will not be controlled.
Then there are diseases where you vaccinate a population to keep the disease from appearing, by preventing a susceptible population. In pets, these would include canine and feline distemper and parvovirus. If you do not vaccinate your cat for distemper, the risk of contracting the disease is negligible, just as if your child is not vaccinated for diphtheria. You keep 90% of the population vaccinated and you will see few epidemics.
But if everyone starts to think this way, because each individual animal we see in fact would be more likely to have a reaction than run into the disease, then we will see epidemics and lose thousands of patients. In human medicine this conundrum is solved by mandating the vaccination legally. We do not do that. (Rabies is mandated because of human risk, not because it is a threat to animals.)
While it certainly can be argued that many of those human vaccines are not necessary, drug company dollars have influenced the politicians to mandate vaccination, it could also be argued that what your chiropractor is doing is certainly in the best interests of her children, provided that everybody else's children take the risk for her, to maintain a protected population.. - Dr. Mac
