Can rabies vaccination cause reduction in intelligence?

No, rabies vaccine it doesn’t cause intellectual impairments. But one will certainly be dumb once rabies infects your brain because you wouldn’t get the shot.

@zenvelo so how does one explain the story of “that kid got bitten by a dog and got rabies shot and now he is much dumber than before”? This is the story that I’ve been hearing since I was a kid. Was that because the kid in question got the vaccine too late and the virus had already eaten his brain, and people just lashed onto the vaccine because of confirmation bias?

Maybe it was just a story passed around for ages with perhaps a tiny bit of truth behind it that got blown out of proportion in the retelling.
Also the odds of getting rabies from a healthy puppy are infinitesimal.

Incredibly unlikely to get rabies from a scratch, but not impossible. Also worth saying that rabies is nothing to play with.

Is the puppy not vaccinated? Was it a stray? Does your area have a lot of rabies? Where I grew up it was a real concern. A coworker of my mom took in a stray kitten, she and her children were bitten, the kitty was unusually aggressive, but it can be hard to tell with kittens and puppies, because they are rambunctious. Turned out the kitty was rabid.

I’ve never heard that a rabies shot makes people stupid, probably some old wives tale.

My husband had rabies shots back when it was like 20 in your tummy. I know other people who had the newer series in their arm. I don’t see any indication of their intelligence going down.

@Mimishu1995 Anecdotes have no basis for belief. Saying the kid was dumber after a rabies shot without any other factors even discussed is just misinformation.

It is like saying a watermelon will grow in your stomach if you eat the seeds.

Answer these questions:

Did the kid who got dumb from a vaccine get bit by a dog or a bat? They may not be dumb but traumatized.

Does anyone have intelligence test scores from before and after? Maybe the kid was always dumb; it is pretty dumb to play with a rabid dog.

Sounds like urban legend to me.

Perhaps the child was about 3 and developed autism around the time of rabies vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861294/#:~:text=Results,for%20each%20year%20of%20age.

Thank you everyone for answering. I have always had that sense of uneasiness since I first heard about it, like it wasn’t supposed to be true. But I had no way of verifying it since I was young and didn’t know how to look up sources. In recent time I’ve seen clips of people getting rabies and it’s so horrible I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And it’s just so infuriating to me that someone would refuse to vaccinate just because they are afraid of being stupid, as if the prospect of being dumb is a worse fate than catching rabies although I don’t think anything bad is going to happen to her since it’s a puppy.

Before I asked this question, I wrote on the chat that “you know what? When rabies hit you, you would wish you were dumb from the vaccine”.

Oh, and also one of my friend didn’t know how horrible rabies can be until this conversation.

I think there is something like a 1 in a million chance of getting a vaccine-induced encephalitis from a bad reaction to a rabies vaccination (I don’t know the actual risk other than it being exceedingly low—if it even is a thing). Whatever the actual risk is, the risk of dying from being bitten by a rabid animal is many orders of magnitude higher. It would be like not wearing a safety rope while rock climbing because you’re scared of getting a rope burn that could become infected and eventually cause fatal septicemia.

@gorillapaws – ... not wearing a safety rope while rock climbing during a rain storm, when the risk of slippage is pretty high.