Because they're afraid it will give their dogs autism

TL;DR, it's NOT THAT BAD. Please for the love of *fuck* if you even think you maybe might have encountered a rabid animal, go get the fucking prophylactic.

Because that's the first thing - there's is not a rabies vaccine for humans. There's a pre-exposure prophylactic and a post-exposure prophylactic, and you'd be getting the post-exposure prophylactic. That means the SOONER YOU DO THAT the BETTER IT WILL WORK. This is NOT like the flu where if you get the shot after you've been exposed to the flu it's not gonna help. Totally different thing.

Second, the media likes to show that these shots have to be given in the stomach which I think used to be a thing but is NOT A THING ANYMORE. Your first shot will be straight into the bite wound, wherever that happens to be (mine was my ankle right on a bone which was pretty painful but honestly not that much worse than the bite? So like, it hurt sure but it hurt *already* so I don't know how much of that was the shot. If they can't give you all the shot there, you get the rest somewhere else – my bony ankle could only absorb so much so the rest went in my thigh (not painful at all). I assume it's thigh meat or arm meat depending on where the bite is.

After that you have to get boosters over the next few weeks. I think there were 3 or 4 of those and other than the weird part of "having to be administered in an ER" they were basically the same as flu shots. Upper arm, just felt like a regular shot. Nothing bad. If anything it wasn't as bad as a flu shot, because my arm didn't even hurt the rest of the day like when I get flu shots.

Additionally, my insurance did not fight with me on this AT ALL. I assume that's pretty standard, some things you DO NOT fuck around with on waiting periods and pre-auths and whateverthefuck and rabies is one. Also that "has to be administered in a ER" thing did *not* mean I had to pay an ER visit fee every time. I had an appointment, and that appointment just happened to be in the ER.

So please please please please please for the love of whatever you hold dear, get the damn shots. If you get them and didn't need them, awesome! If you don't get them and do need them, you are going to die, and it's going to suck the whole time. Two people have survived rabies in the history of people and they got so unreasonably lucky. Do not count on being rabies georg. You. WILL. DIE.

I had randomly generated 2 words, which is where “mole interest” came from. I failed to consider that by generating a new tag, it wouldn’t have had enough posts already in it to prove what I now call “the mole interest effect”.

But now it does.

In 2023, we said “fuck it” a la mythbusters and ended up doing whatever it took to get #mole interest to trend. And it did. And it happened to be September 11th that day, and we managed to get #mole interest to trend ABOVE #9/11.