This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no doses here, no portion sizes, no feeding amounts, no exercise durations and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your animal has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic.
This page used to carry a vaccination schedule. It does not any more, and that was deliberate. Until 5 August 2026 this post named specific vaccines and gave an age in weeks. Both were removed. This site publishes no dose, no interval, no minimum age, no product name and no schedule for anything, and a vaccination schedule for a kitten is the clearest case of an instruction a web page should not be handing to a stranger.
What is left is what can honestly be written by somebody who cannot see your cat: what the schedule is for, who writes it, why it is a series, what the indoor cat question actually turns on, what is known about the one serious adverse effect the profession worries about, and what to ask the person who can see your cat.
Why there is no schedule here
A vaccination plan is a clinical decision. It depends on the individual animal, on what it will be exposed to, on what its mother had and when, on what the practice stocks and on the local disease picture. None of that can be supplied to a web page, and none of it can be inferred by one.
The published guidance is written for veterinary surgeons. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association vaccination guidelines describe themselves as providing “practical advice to veterinarians on optimum vaccination practice”. Read on 5 August 2026, that page records the current guidelines as published on 26 March 2024 and updated on 29 July 2026. Taking a table out of a professional document and putting it on a consumer page removes every caveat that made it usable.
So this page names the source and stops.
Why it is a series and not one visit
A kitten is born carrying antibody it did not make, transferred from its mother. That antibody protects it, and at the same time it interferes with the response to a vaccine. The European Medicines Agency reflection paper on maternally derived antibodies, reference EMA/CVMP/IWP/439467/2007, last updated 18 March 2010 and read on 5 August 2026, exists to tell manufacturers how to demonstrate “to which extent MDAs may have an impact on the efficacy of vaccines when administered to animals at an age at which maternally acquired immunity is still present”.
It fades. It fades at a rate that differs between litters and between kittens in the same litter, and there is no routine way to see where an individual kitten has got to.
Why a kitten gets more than one visit
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at birth antibody from the mother is present
it protects, and it blocks vaccine response
over time that antibody fades
the rate differs between kittens
the problem nobody can see when it has faded
the answer more than one dose, spaced out, so that at
least one lands after the block has gone and
before the kitten meets the thing itself
the numbers how many, how far apart, and from what age
are the veterinary surgeon's decision
they are not on this page
The indoor cat question, answered honestly
This is the question the old version of this page answered with a slogan. It deserves better, because the honest answer is that it is a risk assessment and the facts that decide it belong to you, not to us.
What changes the answer, and none of these is a recommendation, is whether any other cat comes into the house, whether the cat will ever be boarded or hospitalised, whether a window or a door has ever been left open, whether anyone in the household fosters, whether the cat will travel, and what the law requires where you are going. A cat that has never been outside is not a cat that has never been exposed to anything, and a cat that lives alone in a flat is in a genuinely different position from one in a house with a cat flap.
What this page will not do is tell you which of those facts is decisive, because that weighting is the clinical judgement, and it is the reason the appointment exists.
The one serious adverse effect, and what is actually known
The European Advisory Board on Cat Diseases publishes a guideline on feline injection site sarcoma. It was published on 1 January 2015, last updated on 8 February 2024, last reviewed on 25 March 2026, and read on 5 August 2026: the ABCD guideline for feline injection site sarcoma.
It opens by describing what it is: “in cats, invasive sarcomas (mostly fibrosarcomas), so called ‘feline injection site sarcomas’ (FISS), are the most serious adverse effects following vaccination”. That is a strong sentence and it is worth reading it exactly. It says most serious, not most common.
On cause the guideline is careful in a way that most writing on this subject is not: “despite extensive research on the pathogenesis of FISS, there is no definitive causal relationship that explains their occurrence nor a direct link with vaccination”. The leading idea is not a specific vaccine but inflammation itself: “the most widely accepted hypothesis suggests that chronic inflammatory reaction at the site of an injection provides a trigger for subsequent malignant transformation”.
Feline injection site sarcoma, as the ABCD guideline reports it
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what it is invasive sarcoma, mostly fibrosarcoma
described as the most serious adverse
effect following vaccination
cause no definitive causal relationship established
no direct link with vaccination established
leading hypothesis
chronic inflammation at an injection site
as a trigger for malignant transformation
incidence, as reported by the guideline
United States 1 to 4 in every 10,000 vaccinated cats
another figure 0.3 cases per 10,000 vaccines, alongside
11.8 post vaccinal inflammatory reactions
per 10,000 vaccinations
United Kingdom described as relatively low; a 2007 estimate
of 1 in 16,000 to 50,000 cats per year
registered by practices
guideline dates published 1 January 2015
updated 8 February 2024
reviewed 25 March 2026
Those denominators matter more than the numerators. A figure of one to four in every ten thousand vaccinated cats is a different kind of statement from one in sixteen thousand to fifty thousand registered cats per year, and the two cannot be compared directly. We print them side by side with their denominators attached rather than picking the one that makes a better sentence.
This page gives no injection site, no monitoring rule and no timescale for when a lump matters, because all three are clinical and all three would be applied by a reader to a lump they cannot assess. If you find one, that is a phone call to the practice.
What the different kinds of vaccine are
The MSD Veterinary Manual page on types of vaccines for animals, read 5 August 2026, sets the categories out without any species schedule attached. Vaccines containing living organisms “tend to trigger the best protective responses”, because “living viruses from vaccines, for example, infect host cells and grow briefly. The infected cells then process the viral antigens, triggering a response dominated by cytotoxic T cells”.
Killed organisms and purified antigens produce a response dominated by antibody, and the manual notes they “may require multiple doses and also require the use of adjuvants to maximize their effectiveness”. It then names the cost of that: adjuvants “may, however, cause local inflammation, and multiple doses or high doses of antigen increase the risks of producing hypersensitivity reactions”.
Hold that beside the ABCD hypothesis about chronic inflammation and you can see why the choice of product is a professional decision rather than a preference.
If something goes wrong afterwards
In the United Kingdom, suspected problems with an animal medicine go to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate. The GOV.UK page on reporting a suspected problem with an animal medicine or microchip, last updated 18 December 2024 and read on 5 August 2026, is written for the public as well as for professionals.
Reportable problems include “times when a medicine has not worked” and “reactions and side effects already listed on the product’s packaging”, as well as problems where a medicine was used contrary to instructions and human reactions to an animal medicine. Reports can be made online, on a paper form from the VMD, or through your vet or the manufacturer. The page says “the VMD will use reports to help check if medicines continue to be safe and work as expected”, and that “you will not get updates about your report”.
A reaction that is already printed on the packaging is still worth reporting. Most owners do not know that.
What to ask, printable
Questions for the appointment. Not instructions, and not a schedule.
What we could not source
- The WSAVA guideline document itself. We read the landing page and quoted only what that page states about audience and dates.
- A current UK incidence figure for injection site sarcoma. The most recent UK estimate the guideline reports is from 2007. We have not updated it by inference.
- Any figure for vaccination uptake in UK cats. Not obtained in a dated, readable form.
- Any statement about duration of immunity, or about titre testing. The question owners most want answered. It could not be sourced in a form that would be safe to publish without a schedule attached, so it is not answered here.
- Whether indoor only cats are at lower risk in the UK specifically. Widely asserted, not obtained from a publisher with a figure attached.
Related reading on this site
The same refusal applied elsewhere: the food reference explains why there are no feeding amounts anywhere here, and the breed pages, for example the Bengal page and the Persian page, name the figures they decline to reproduce.
Also useful for a new cat: switching food safely, the poison control directory, what to do if your cat ate something, finding an emergency vet and litter box problems. For spending, the annual cost of owning a cat and the vet costs guide. The dog version of this page is the puppy vaccination page.
