Puppies died after parvo shots. Was it the vaccine or the disease?

Question

My friends dog had a litter of 5 puppies and after 2 months he took his pups to the vet and gave them vaccines for parvo virus but after that day the pups got lethergic and got very sick and then after 6 days all pups died. The vet said that they had parvo virus. But before giving them the vaccine the pups were healthy and active. What can be the problem ? Pet's info: Dog | Labrador Retriever | Female | unspayed | 1 year and 7 months old

Jennifer Summerfield, DVM CPDT-KA · Accepted Answer

I'm very sorry to hear that this happened! Unfortunately, there is no way to know why the puppies got sick and died unless an autopsy was done on one or more of them, or some testing was done before they passed away. Parvo is certainly one possibility - the incubation period for this virus is 7-10 days, so this means that they were probably exposed sometime before their vet visit and began showing symptoms a few days later. They also could have had distemper, canine herpesvirus, or a severe intestinal parasite burden - all of these can cause death in young puppies as well. I would not expect the vaccine to have had anything to do with this, since it would be extremely uncommon for all of the puppies in a litter to all have a serious vaccine reaction. Serious reactions are quite rare, and normally affected dogs become extremely sick immediately and die within 24 hours - so the timing doesn't really fit either. It's likely that the timing of the vaccine was a coincidence, and the cause of death was an infectious disease or some other unrelated event. Again, I'm very sorry for the loss of your friend's pups.

Puppies died after parvo shots. Was it the vaccine or the disease?

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