Pets could need vaccines to help stop spread of Covid-19, scientists say

Scientists explain that cats and dog could need vaccines to help control the spread of coronavirus.

A separate rollout to vaccinate pet cats and dogs against Covid-19 may be necessary. It’s not clear how many and cats have been infected and if symptoms appear at all they seem to be mild. 

The University of East Anglia has found that coronavirus can infect a wide range of species including cats, dogs, mink and other domesticated species.

In an editorial published in the journal Virulence, scientists from the Norwich-based research facility wrote that the evolution of the virus in animals followed by the transmission to humans ‘poses a significant long-term risk to public health’.  

They added: “It is not unthinkable that vaccination of some domesticated animal species might be necessary to curb the spread of the infection,”

One of the writer’s, Cock van Oosterhout, professor of evolutionary genetics said dogs and cats can contract coronavirus but there are no known cases of them carrying it on to humans.

He said: “It makes sense to develop vaccines for pets, for domestic animals, just as a precaution to reduce this risk.

“What we need to be as a human society, we really need to be prepared for any eventuality when it comes to COVID.

“I think the best way to do this is indeed consider the development of vaccines for animals as well.”

He added that Russia has ‘already started to develop a vaccine for pets’ despite ‘very little information’ being about. 

Denmark’s government last year culled millions of mink after it emerged hundreds of Covid-19 cases in the country were linked with coronavirus variants associated with farmed milk.

Editor-in-chief of Virulence, Kevin Tyler, said: “The risk is that… it starts to pass as it did in the mink from animal to animal and then starts to evolve animal-specific strains, but then they spill back into the human population and you end up essentially with a new virus which is related which causes the whole thing all over again.” He added that ‘it’s not an obvious risk yet’. 

Professor van Oosterhout wrote the editorial along with Professor Tyler ad the director of the Earlham Institute Neil Hall, and Hinh Ly of the University of Minnesota.

They wrote: “Continued virus evolution in reservoir animal hosts, followed by spillback events into susceptible human hosts, poses a significant long-term risk to public health.

“SARS-CoV-2 can infect a wide range of host species, including cats, dogs, mink and other wild and domesticated species and, hence, the vaccination of domesticated animals might be required to halt further virus evolution and spillback events.

“Whilst the vaccination campaigns against SARS-CoV-2/ Covid-19 are being rolled out worldwide, new virus variants are likely to continue to evolve that have the potential to sweep through the human population.”

The added that to keep coronavirus under control, in particular the more transmissible virus strains such as the UK variant, more people need to be vaccinated.

“Vaccination against a viral pathogen with such high prevalence globally is without precedent and we, therefore, have found ourselves in uncharted waters,” they wrote.

They have called on the government to consider strict control measures such as masks and social distancing to reduce the evolution and spread of new variants.