NEW YORK—Five Americans died of rabies last year—the largest number in a decade—and health officials said Thursday that some of the people didn’t realize they had been infected or refused life-saving shots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on three of the deaths, all stemming from contact with bats. CDC officials said the deaths were tragic and could have been prevented. One, an 80-year-old Illinois man, refused to take life-saving shots because of a longstanding fear of vaccines. An Idaho man and a Texas boy did not get shots because of a belief that no bat bite or scratch broke their skin. In all three cases, people “either trivialized the exposure [to bats] or they didn’t recognize the severity of rabies,” said Ryan Wallace, a CDC rabies expert who coauthored the report. Two other deaths occurred earlier in 2021. One was a Minnesota man bitten by …