Yeah, unfortunately, the honest answer is yes, of course, there is. I mean, you're putting a foreign substance into a living creature. Animals are going to react differently, no different than people might do. So, yes. It's hard to predict which vaccine they're going to react to because, again, every animal is different, but the most common ones that we'll see reactions to are things like rabies and sometimes lepto that I mentioned earlier.
You know that old expression, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I am one of those guys that really like to vaccinate my own dogs, because I would much rather take that rare chance of them having a vaccine reaction but know that they're protected, because I can tell you, as a veterinarian, I've seen too many puppies die of parvovirus right in front of me that could have been prevented with adequate vaccination.

On the whole, everything that we're injecting into an animal does come with associated risks. Most of the time it's perfectly benign and actually helps much more than it hurts. The leptospirosis vaccine, in particular, often causes a mild vaccine reaction with some swelling or pain at the injection site. Thankfully, that’s a pretty simple fix. Just call your veterinarian, and they can prescribe pain meds as needed.

This is really important. So you’ll start them between six and nine weeks and then every three weeks after that, up until their fourth-round—especially for that parvovirus vaccine. We definitely don't want them to be exposed to unknown environments or unvaccinated dogs even three to four weeks after their last puppy vaccine.

For starters, the first set of vaccines...I would normally give a puppy between the six and eight-week range for the first set. When they are young and they nurse and they get colostrum from their mothers, the antibodies that they receive from their mom usually last in the 9 to 10 weeks. I'd probably say 10 weeks would be my answer, range before those antibodies start to wane. We don't know that for certain, and it's not really feasible to get a blood sample and send off antibody titers on a six or seven or eight-week-old puppy. So, we normally start them early, just in case they didn't get adequate antibodies.
The second part of that question was how often do they need to be seen for vaccines? I don't give vaccines in puppies any closer than three weeks apart. So, if they had one at, let's just say, seven weeks, the next one I would recommend doing is at 10 weeks. The next one after that would be 13 weeks, no sooner than that. If it's a week or so later because of your schedule or something, that's fine. You just don't want them any closer together than that.
And my rule of thumb at the end of the day is I want them to have a minimum of two sets of vaccines after 10 weeks. That's because, by then, those maternal antibodies are gone. They're making their own antibodies to your vaccine, and they need to see it at least twice to get an adequate response with antibody production.

The non-core vaccines (at least the ones that we administer here) are leptospirosis and bordetella. We especially recommend the bordetella vaccine for dogs that go to dog parks or boarding facilities. That's for kennel cough, which is a respiratory condition. And then leptospirosis is a bacterium they can get out in the environment, especially around water, and that can really affect their kidneys. So we'll vaccinate against that.

Core vaccines are the ones that should be given to every puppy regardless of their lifestyle, regardless of what your intentions with that dog are. And I'll explain a little bit better. So core, again, parvo, distemper. Every dog should get those ones.
At the same time, there are things called non-core vaccines, and those are a little bit more dependent on what your dog's lifestyle is. Two examples I can think of right out of the gate, one is leptospirosis. Leptospirosis is usually a bacterial disease picked up from rodents. Well, if your dog's never out in the field or in places where rodents seem to frequent, you might argue that that one's non-core. Do I give it to my dogs? Yeah, but they're outside hunting with me quite a bit.
Another one is Lyme disease. Depending on where you live and how outdoorsy, so to speak, your dogs are, maybe that's not a core vaccine. The only way they get exposed to Lyme is if they're exposed to a tick who carries it and that's in certain regions of the country and outdoors, so that would be considered a non-core vaccine.