05/06/2025
PARVO, PUPPIES and INFECTION
Why the hell am I only learning this now?
Has anyone ever been told this when getting it?
I bet not.
Now, before folk get their knickers in a twist - parvo is a bitch. It will run through a pack of very young pups and decimate them. I'm told the vaccine is highly effective so it remains the only vaccine I (a non-vet) still recommend for pups (as the flu doesn't scare me and there's no distemper in Ireland or UK). But that's just me, you do you.
Now, caveat made, look what I found out about the parvo vaccine...
Parvo jab is an MLV vaccine, meaning it's a Modified Live Virus. They say, in this weakened but still LIVE form, that there is little threat to healthy dogs (although you will quickly see the immunocompromised are told to be careful!
But has anyone actually measured how infectious contaminated dog stool are to healthy dogs? Because I can't find a single bit of useful data on it.
What we do know is that transmission seems to occur in every other animal given such vaccines. PRRS is known to spread like wildfire in intensively reared pigs vaccinated with MLV PRRS and from there, from farm to farm. In poultry, too. They even have a term for it in chickens - field outbreaks.
In humans, oral MLV polio vaccines (safe & effective) are known to cause outbreaks of paralytic polio in populations. It's termed a vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) outbreak and dozens of countries now report such outbreaks following polio vaccine programs.
But it's DEFINITELY not happening in dogs or cats.
Hmmm 😕
Know what else is interesting? Canine Parvovirus only popped up in dogs in late 1978.
They say it was a natural mutation in FIV, Feline Immuno-Deficiency Virus.
Really?!
Just as they had formulated a canine parvo vaccine made on infected cat kidney (Google it, that's how they made them!)? JUST THEN it happened to jump from cat to human?!!
Fish market 8miles from the Wuhan Covid Gain of Function Research Laboratory anyone?!!!
While FIV in cats and CPV in dogs are very similar (98-99% similarity) the fact remains it's very rare for diseases to cross species like that. Very rare. And, much like trying to find C-19 in the population prior to the (accidental) lab release in Wuhan, scientists have never EVER found a SINGLE isolate of CPV in dogs prior to 1977. No bridging leaps whatsoever.
Then it just sort of happened.
All of a sudden.
And like, everywhere.
By early 1979 multiple countries were reporting CPV outbreaks in dogs, a surprisingly rapid spread in a time when folk were a lot more sedentary.
Or, is it possible, just shooting the breeze here, that MLV vaccines were at play?
When Decaro et al. (2020) were wondering why the canine parvo vaccine campaign hadn't eradicated parvo in the dog population despite virtually every single puppy in the Western World getting vaccinated for it, they mention "vaccine reversion" as a possible explanation, a hypothetical scenario where MLV vaccines may be indvertently driving the reversion of the virus back to a highly virulent and infectious form.
We do know they had been messing around with MLV versions of parvo virus for livestock for two decades before it popped up in dogs.
In the 1950s they developed pig parvovirus (PPV) MLV vaccines. By the 1960s work on the bovine parvovirus MLV vaccine began and later that decade the first feline MLV parvo vaccines were rolled out. Then, in the mid 70s, they set to work on the canine version using infected cat kidney. Very soon after we start hearing reports that parvo had suddenly mutated its way from cats into dogs.
For the first time.
Ever.
Actually, that leap has happened one other time. Recently in 2016 with avian influenza.
You know, the virus Bill Gates and co at the University of Washington had been conducting extensive "Gain of Function" (making more deadly) research upon since 2013?
Yep, by constantly injecting the snot from sick birds up the noses of healthy ferrets (a well-established model for encouraging human influenza transmission), they helped the avian influenza virus develop new features - making it airborne and greatly enhancing inter-mammalian transmissibility. This was then (accidentally) released from two separate, tier 5 labs (one in the US, one in the Netherlands) AT THE SAME TIME, ensuring a nice quick spread of a virus that normally spreads slowly (relying on wild birds, the last bird flu outbreak took 7 years to get from Asia to Europe and another 7 years to cross the pond to the US).
Anyway, I'm just shooting the breeze here.
Safe and effective.
