Lyme disease vaccine: the frustrating reason there isn’t one for humans

Your dog can get vaccinated for Lyme. You cannot.

Lyme has quickly become one of the most common infectious diseases in America, with many as 300,000 people infected every year. And public health officials fear the bacterial infection, which jumps from ticks to humans, will only spread farther and faster as climate change makes more parts of the US habitable for ticks.

Lyme can be treated with antibiotics. And there are many ways to prevent tick bites. But there’s no vaccine available if you want extra protection against the disease (unless you’re adog).

Yet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a vaccine called LYMErix was sold to prevent between 76 and 92 percent of infections. Hundreds of thousands of people got it — until vaccine fear knocked it off the market.

The LYMErix story is worth retelling today. It’s a stark reminder of how anti-vaccine mania of the past few decades is leaving us all more susceptible to disease.

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