Why does my veterinarian require an examination when giving vaccinations?

First of all, we know exams are critical. Not that they necessarily outweigh some of the importance of vaccines, but there's a lot that we need to learn and remember that exams themselves are essential to your cat's health. That's what you're getting the vaccines for is for your cat's health. But as far as some other factors, there does need to be a certain legality of a client-patient relationship that we have to maintain to make recommendations, give medications, and do vaccines like that.

We need to maintain an exam, usually at least once a year, to keep that client-patient relationship. But then, more specifically for the individual cats, we want to make sure that they're well and healthy enough on that day to get the vaccine and make sure they don't have fevers, make sure there's no certain concurrent disease that would interfere with the vaccine function or the safety of the vaccine. We also want to know your pet's history through exams and things like that, so we know whether they have a disease that would make a certain vaccine potentially unsafe to perhaps change the protocol, do pre-meds, or other things like that. It’s not that we're just trying to be mean about it. There are many important reasons why we need to have that exam with vaccines.