This is a Swiss invention; a vaccine given to cats which neutralises the allergens inside cats. It prevents the allergens causing an allergic reaction in people who are allergic to cats. It is called the Hypocat vaccine.
They have been working on it since 2013. Martin Bachmann, the chief scientific officer at HypoPet said that he is confident that it works.
He said that it is safe for cats. Subject to being approved by American and European regulators it may be on the market in 2022.
The video makes the obvious point (but worth making) that the vaccine is for cats and not people so it will not prevent a person from suffering a reaction to cats who have not been vaccinated.
Comment: if this does work it will be a massive success for millions of cat loving people who can’t live with a cat because of their allergy and it’ll be big business. It’ll be huge because this is the holy grail of many businesses in the pet market. About 10% of people are allergic to cats. This would be around 30 million people in America.
Let’s say they’d sell around 50 million vaccines in the US and Europe as there are many multi-cat homes. If each one cost $50 that makes $2.5 trillion dollars of business. Bonanza time.
There have been other attempts to resolve this extremely difficult problem and it is one which is a cruel barrier to domestic cat ownership.
