Why are we protecting dogs but not humans against epidemic Lyme disease?

This summer has seen a national surge in tick-related emergency room visits, with the Northeast experiencing the highest numbers. The New York State Department of Health has all of Long Island and the Hudson Valley in the highest risk category. The epidemic is so bad that Stony Brook Southampton Hospital is opening a dedicated Regional Tick-Borne Disease Center. An on-site team of infectious disease specialists is seeing enough cases to just focus on tick bites.

One common tick-borne illness, Lyme disease, which has plagued the region for many years, has a useful vaccine — but only for dogs. It is simply a scandal that several Lyme disease vaccines are approved for dogs yet none are for people. While Robert Kennedy Jr., the head of Health and Human Services, is a well-known vaccine critic, it is way past time for human health to be put on a par with that of our pets. The Lyme vaccines that uninfected puppies and dogs get are not perfect — they are around 70% effective, have some mild side effects and don't last for more than six months requiring annual boosters. Still, they help prevent a miserable, often disabling disease.

A Lyme vaccine for humans was licensed in the United States in 1998 but was subsequently abandoned because of a lack of sales. Lyme disease was not the problem it was 25 years ago when less than 20,000 cases were reported nationally. Today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 500,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease annually with 20,000 new cases every year in New York.

Kennedy says he is for emphasizing preventive health. Lyme disease desperately needs prevention. So do a huge number of other infectious diseases for which we have no vaccines, including avian flu, herpes, syphilis, malaria, TB, Salmonella, Zika and, those needing stronger, more long-lasting vaccines, such as COVID-19, flu, whooping cough, yellow and dengue fever.

Kennedy and his allies in government are pushing in the other direction.

HHS is cutting grants for vaccine research, most notably and recently $500 million for mRNA vaccine research. This is the very vaccine type that President Donald Trump proudly supported and that saved millions in the first horrible, lethal wave of COVID-19.

Old ways of making vaccines require growing millions of weakened whole viruses in eggs, which takes a lot of time and could make some people ill. The new, mRNA technique Kennedy just killed is much safer and more effective. It works by delivering a piece of genetic material, messenger RNA (mRNA), from a small bit of the nasty virus or bacteria into our cells. The mRNA instructs the cells to produce a specific, tiny fragment of protein in response. The immune system recognizes this bit of protein as foreign and develops a response by producing antibodies, which protect against future infections by the infectious agent.

No chickens, no eggs, no egg allergies. This process allows a lot of vaccines to get made in record time — even a year or less. Not long pants and scary body searches now recommended for Lyme prevention but an effective vaccine at least as good as Fido gets.

As tick-borne illnesses explode, Kennedy should demand that GlaxoSmithKline, which still holds the license for the 1998 LYMErix human vaccine, be made available on an emergency basis. Pfizer, which testing a new human vaccine, ought to get full government support, including the funding needed to rapidly finish its research. 

Ticks love warmer, wetter climates, so Lyme disease is a growing epidemic. It needs government, industry and medicine to treat it as such.

This guest essay reflects the views of Arthur Caplan, a professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.