Assessing incidence from 1990, there's been less than 1 case of rabies diagnosed per 10 years in my state - less than 0.1 cases per year. So the odds of my dogs getting rabies where I live is 1 in 220,000,000.

Now my vet says that all dogs should get a rabies shot when they are puppies, a booster a year after, and boosters every 1 to 3 years after that for the rest of their lives, just to be safe. That's something like 6 to 10 rabies vaccinations during their lifetime.

Veterinary studies have found that rabies is one of the more reactive vaccines, with some veterinarians reporting adverse events in 1 of every 283 vaccinations. And that's only accounting for the adverse events which occurred within 3 days of vaccination - not the ones that showed up later.

A space–time cluster of adverse events associated with canine rabies vaccine - PMC
Electronic medical records of a large veterinary practice were used for surveillance of potential space–time clustering of adverse events associated with rabies vaccination in dogs. The study population was 257,564 dogs vaccinated in 169 hospitals…
NCBI home page⁎Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 765 496 3393; fax: +1 765 494 9830.

The study above found 2.85% of rabies canine vaccinations resulted in adverse events. So if we use that number, and consider the cumulative risk of receiving 6 or 10 vaccines, the odds of an adverse reaction become extremely high.

Now let's compare the odds of my dog catching fatal rabies in my state, to the odds of my dog being harmed or negatively effected by the rabies vaccines:

Unfortunately I didn't do this research before I got my dog vaccinated, and two years later she can't use this leg.

Ok, but what about humans? What is the risk we'll contract rabies?

Since 2000, an average of 2 Americans per year out of 334,914,895 have died of rabies.

To put that in perspective, ants kill 30 Americans each year. You are 15x more likely to die from ants than to die from rabies. And you are 11x more likely to die from getting struck by lightning.

This begs the question - why is our culture so hyper fixated on the risk and fear of rabies when the risk is not significant?

Why the hell is our government spending $500 million tax payer dollars a year on rabies "prevention and control"?

The truth is, rabies is not a sustainable pathogen in nature unless it is artificially amplified.

Rabies kills its host too quickly and is nearly 100% fatal. It can't be spread human-to-human, even through intimate contact - it requires a specific, violent mode of transmission: usually a deep animal bite with infected saliva. And most of the time, animals which are infected are not "mad" and "vicious", but extremely weak and disoriented - unable to roam, attack and infect others.

A real “wild” virus should mutate toward less lethality and easier transmission (like respiratory or fecal-oral viruses). Rabies? It goes against all evolutionary viral logic. But the rabies virus kills host that is keeping it alive and allowing it to spread - it's a suicidal virus that goes against everything in nature.

Let's dive into the history of rabies.

Louis Pasteur, the so-called "father of germ theory," was not just a scientist — he was a narrative architect. His rabies vaccine was developed in 1885 based on a primitive and highly suspect methodology.

He cultivated "rabies" in rabbit spinal cords through serial passage (i.e., injecting rabbit after rabbit). Pasteur then repeated the process another 39 times before using the resulting material to make his dried rabbit brain tissue vaccine which was ready to be injected into humans.

On the CDC's website we read:

"On July 6, 1885, Louis Pasteur and his colleagues injected the first of 14 daily doses of rabbit spinal cord suspensions containing progressively inactivated rabies virus into 9-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog 2 days before...
He established beyond doubt that a solid immunity could be brought about without endangering the life or health of the vaccinated person. Thanks to the rabies epic ... immunization has become recognized as a general law of nature."

5 months after his first human test subject he wrote, "Already patients are rushing here from England, Russia, Hungary, Italy and Germany. I would love to stop, but it is impossible. I would like to treat only recently bitten patients. Also impossible! What excuse could I use? The method requires it."

When injected into patients it induced antibodies against myelin basic protein and an acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis developed in multiple patients, but not all of them - which he considered a great success.

But despite all of Pasteur's work with rabies, he never actually identified the virus or confirmed its existence. He could not find the bacterium that consistently produced the disease - so he simply explained that it must be caused by a pathogen too small for detection by microscopes.

The end result of Pasteur's lab experiments was not a wild virus, but a laboratory-adapted agent, something far more dangerous than what existed in nature. He claimed success despite using human subjects without controls, and hid experimental failures (this is well-documented from his private lab notebooks).

It was not until 1903 that Negri bodies were identified as the defining feature of rabies. Hundreds of cases were diagnosed as rabies post mortem due to these pathological findings.

But the entire Negri-rabies association turned out to be false. Negri bodies were also found to be associated with herpes simplex infections, cytomegalovirus (CMV), encephalitis of other origins (viral and non-viral), certain autoimmune or degenerative neurological diseases, and lead or metal poisoning.

The odds of you contracting rabies from an animal bite? Almost non-existent. But rabies from the vaccine? More probable. The rabies vaccine contains live-attenuated virus, and cases of vaccine-induced rabies, neurological damage, and autoimmune reactions have been documented.