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Covid-19: California zoo begins to vaccinate bears and lions with specific vaccine

2021-07-03T23:15:47.625Z


Oakland Zoo in California is one of the first sites to benefit from these valuable animal-only serums, says the N


The Oakland Zoo in California began vaccinating several of its animals this week.

Among them, bears, pumas, tigers and ferrets, the New York Times reports.

The American veterinary company Zoetis has donated 11,000 doses of the vaccine to seventy zoos, as well as to several animal reserves in 27 American states.

The Oakland Zoo is one of the first sites to benefit from these precious serums intended only for animals, underlines the American daily.

These vaccines, produced by pharmaceutical company Zoetis, go through a different validation process than those designed for humans.

For Alex Herman, vice president of veterinary services at the Oakland Zoo, this vaccination "ensures better safety for our beautiful animals."

"The very first animals to receive the vaccine were our two most beautiful and oldest tigers," he told The New York Times.

Cases observed in gorillas or cats

Although it has not identified any case of Covid-19 in its species, the Oakland Zoo very quickly took exceptional measures to avoid any contamination. The vice-president of the structure thus demanded that employees keep their distance from animals and wear a mask and protective equipment at all times. Because even if they remain in the minority, cases of Covid-19 had already been observed in cats and gorillas in several reserves in the United States.

Last February, great ape residents of the San Diego Zoo (California) became the first non-human primates to receive an injection of this experimental vaccine.

Since the start of the pandemic, pet owners, zookeepers, but also farmers feared that cases of infections would develop in their species.

Read alsoDog, cat, great ape ... should animals be vaccinated against Covid-19?

For their part, many epidemiologists very quickly pointed out the fact that certain animals - domestic or wild - could eventually become a "reservoir" allowing the virus to live, or even to mutate. The scenario of a mutation of Covid-19 in mink, an animal bred for its fur, transmitted to humans already occurred in November in Denmark. The country had thus slaughtered its huge herd of more than 15 million heads, fearing that a mutation of the Covid threatens the effectiveness of the vaccine for humans.

For now, the efficacy of the vaccine proposed by Zoetis for animals is still difficult to determine. The results that the pharmaceutical company presented last October show a strong immune response in cats and dogs. But it remains difficult to know more. “It is an experimental product that has been the subject of small-scale clinical studies. We don't have the mass of animals to test it, unlike vaccines for humans. Our test phase involved a few hundred animals, while that of Pfizer-BioNTech, it was 44,000 people ”, explained Hervé de Cidrac, president of Zoetis France to the Parisian.

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2021-07-03

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