I was a staunch anti-vaxxer and then I went pro-vax - AMA

amother

Thu, Sep 28 2023, 1:04 pm

amother Lightyellow wrote:

It wasn't around when I was a kid. All my kids had the chicken pox vaccine so this isn't relevant to me personally. Supposedly England doesn't offer it because it is more likely to cause shingles later on while complications from chicken pox are extremely rare. I did not research this and don't know if that's true (that the US has much higher rates of shingles), but I was curious how you resolve which country got it right?

The CDC messed up big time with covid. That's when it lost my trust.

I just looked up what you wrote. This is what NHS says:

Quote:

Why is the chickenpox vaccination not part of the routine childhood immunisation schedule?
There's a worry that introducing chickenpox vaccination for all children could increase the risk of chickenpox and shingles in adults.

While chickenpox during childhood is unpleasant, the vast majority of children recover quickly and easily.

In adults, chickenpox is more severe and the risk of complications increases with age.

If a childhood chickenpox vaccination programme was introduced, people would not catch chickenpox as children because the infection would no longer circulate in areas where the majority of children had been vaccinated.

This would leave unvaccinated children susceptible to getting chickenpox as adults, when they're more likely to develop a more severe infection or a secondary complication.

It would also increase instances of chickenpox during pregnancy, when there's a risk of the infection harming the baby.

Routine vaccination of children against chickenpox could also result in a significant increase in cases of shingles in adults.

When people get chickenpox, the virus remains in the body. This can then reactivate at a later date and cause shingles.

Being exposed to chickenpox as an adult (for example, through contact with infected children) boosts your immunity to shingles.

If you vaccinate children against chickenpox, you lose this natural boosting, so immunity in adults will drop and more shingles cases will occur.

The US solution is to get a booster as an adult. I don't know which is better.

The UK still provides chickenpox vaccine to certain populations, though.

Meanwhile, recent research is conflicted as to whether the vaccine reduces the incidence of shingles or not. I guess we will see. But NHS' reasoning is not that the vaccine would cause shingles but that not getting chickenpox in childhood leaves individuals vulnerable as adults.

Which country got it right? I don't know, time will tell. But none of this is telling me that right now the vaccine is dangerous.

amother

Lightyellow

Thu, Sep 28 2023, 1:23 pm

amother OP wrote:

That's fair.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.