urgent advice needed. considering tetanus/TDAP shot for neighborhood cat scratch/puncture wound.
seeking urgent advice about whether to get a tetanus/TDAP shot because of a puncture wound from a neighborhood feral cat. for context, we live in a decent area and our neighbors have an outside cat but we noticed that they don’t really take care of him and so we started to feed him on occasion. he exhibits standard feral cat behavior, like he hisses sometimes for no reason at all, but overall he’s usually pretty affectionate. last night, he seemed on extra high alert about animals being in our bushes in front of our house. so i was going to lure him away onto the driveway in between our cars to make him feel a little safer/less worrisome. as i was trying to walk him over there, i made one of the little noises that i do to call him over so that he knew to walk with me. and instead of continuing to walk he just out of no here jumped up, latched onto my thigh with his claws, then just pushed himself off and acted like nothing happened. i’ve seen him latch onto trees in a similar way. anyways, i ran back inside and started crying lol. my mom advised me that i just take a body shower and really soap up the punctured areas to disinfect them well under the running water etc. after my shower i disinfected the punctures again, applied Neosporin, and bandaged them.
the reason i am posting to this sub is because i was doing research on the protocol advised for situations like this and i came across the tetanus shot or the TDAP shot. as I was looking at prices online on CVS for them i got a weird feeling, and then it hit me…i reminded myself why i stopped taking the flu vaccine post COVID, out of fear that any and all vaccines were now corrupted and going to be used a form of population control in some way. and taking the tet shot would be exposing myself to whatever they want to put in it. i thought i was just overreacting until i came across this sub.
any advice or similar stories is/are appreciated. i’m terrified about getting something from him. i really do not want to fall ill from something that i contracted through his nails since he is outside pretty much 24/7. the incident happened around 10:30pm, when I woke up this morning i changed the bandage, disinfected again, and put another layer of neosporin. the punctures dont sting anymore, they just feel like little bruises.