Pets may need Covid vaccine to prevent further spread

Domesticated animals such as cats and dogs are able to pass on the virus to humans

A person wearing a protective face covering walks their dog in Battersea Park in London. Scientists have suggested pets may need to be immunised against Covid. AFP

Vaccinating pets against Covid-19 could be necessary to stop the spread of Covid-19, scientists have suggested.

Cats and dogs can be infected by the illness, alongside animals such as mink, experts from the University of East Anglia and the University of Minnesota said.

In an editorial for the journal Virulence, they wrote that continued evolution of the virus in animals followed by transmission to humans "poses a significant long-term risk to public health".

“It is not unthinkable that vaccination of some domesticated animal species might be necessary to curb the spread of the infection,” they said.

Last year, Denmark's government culled millions of mink after it was discovered that hundreds of Covid-19 cases in the country were linked with coronavirus variants associated with farmed mink.

One of the editorial’s authors, Cock van Oosterhout, professor of evolutionary genetics at UEA, said dogs and cats can contract coronavirus but that there are no known cases in which there has been transmission to humans.

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

“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 development of vaccines for animals as well.

“The Russians have already started to develop a vaccine for pets, which there’s very little information about.”

Kevin Tyler, editor-in-chief of Virulence, said: "Cats are asymptomatic but they are infected by it and they can infect humans with it.

“The risk is that, as long as there are these reservoirs, 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.”

Vaccination against a viral pathogen with such high prevalence globally is without precedent, the scientists wrote.

They called on governments to consider the continued use of strict control measures such as masks and social distancing as the only way to reduce the evolution and spread of new Covid-19 variants.