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Big cats at the Cincinnati Zoo soon will get a special COVID-19 vaccine. P H OTO : L I SA H U B BA R D
Cincinnati Zoo Animals to Get Special COVID19 Vaccine An experimental, animals-only SARS-COV-2 vaccine is on the way to zoos around the country, including Cincinnati’s BY M A I JA Z U M M O
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merica fell short of U.S. President Joe Biden’s goal of vaccinating 70% of its human population
against COVID-19 by July 4, but the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden is getting ready to start a vaccination
program of its own — only this time, it’s for animals. International animal health company Zoetis is donating more than 11,000 doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to nearly 70 zoos across America, and the Cincinnati Zoo is one of them, says the zoo’s director of animal health, Dr. Mark Campbell. The special two-dose SARS-COV-2 vaccine, which has been approved for experimental use by the United States Department of Agriculture, will arrive at the Cincinnati Zoo later this summer. The first zoo residents to receive the vaccine will be those who have been found to be more susceptible to the virus, including big cats, gorillas and other mammals who have close
interactions with humans, according to the zoo. The Oakland Zoo began vaccinating its high-risk animals — tigers, black bears, grizzly bears, mountain lions and ferrets — with the Zoetis vaccine on June 30 and all are “doing great post-vaccine,” Erin Harrison, a spokeswoman for the zoo, told CNN. The Zoetis coronavirus vaccine is specifically made for animals, not for humans. “When the first dog was infected with COVID-19 in Hong Kong last year, we immediately began to work on a vaccine that could be used in domestic animals, and in eight months we completed our initial safety studies,” says CONTINUES ON PAGE 08
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