Chickenpox Vaccine Linked to Rise in Shingles

Yesterday Moderna announced its mRNA shingles vaccine is in late-stage trials. Its stock bump was meh. But what does a new shingles vaccine mean for the rest of us?

Codename mRNA-1468 is the vaccine Moderna is developing to help protect adults from shingles.

Shingles is a disease caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, varicella-zoster. After a person gets chickenpox, the virus stays dormant in the body. Its later reactivation, during a period of stress or low immunity, can manifest as shingles.

Big Pharma’s big race to create a technologically new shingles vaccine today started with the chickenpox vaccine, which was developed nearly thirty years ago.

A new vaccine added to the schedule

In 1995, the CDC added the chickenpox vaccine to its list of recommended childhood vaccinations.

This new recommendation was surprising.

Until the mid ‘90s, vaccines had been used as a way to protect children from serious childhood diseases.

So why would children need a vaccine against such a mild illness?

There’s no way to massage the numbers to make chickenpox look more dangerous than it actually was.

Until the vaccine was introduced, chickenpox was associated with only a hundred deaths each year, out of nearly 4 million cases.

Chickenpox is more serious in adults than in children. So even though fewer adults were infected than children, about half the people who died from it were grown-ups.  

But once Merck & Co. had developed this vaccine, they absolutely had to find a market for it.

Ka-ching!

Today all fifty states “require” the vaccine for children who want to attend school.

You can get the chickenpox (varicella) vaccine by itself. Or along with an MMR vaccine, also manufactured by Merck. This MMRV vaccine, called ProQuad, was approved by the FDA in 2005.

Lied to by the school nurse

If you want to opt out of the chickenpox or any other vaccine for your children, the majority of states in the United States allow for non-medical exemptions.

However, school nurses and administrative assistants, as well as principals and other school staff, often fail to inform parents that vaccine exemptions are part of state law.

That’s what happened to a young military mom who has three children under seven.

My friend Caitlin was told by the school nurse that if she didn’t get her daughter up to date on all of her vaccines, Kimmy would no longer be allowed to come to school. They lived in South Carolina at the time, a state which allows for religious exemptions.

What’s more, South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMasters, is an outspoken champion of freedom of vaccine choice. In November of 2021 he filed three lawsuits against the federal government challenging the Biden Administration’s COVID vaccine mandates.

A stay-at-home mom with a baby, Caitlin had no idea that the school nurse was lying to her.

Against her better judgment, she took her daughter to the doctor. Kimmy was given four shots, two in each arm.

She and her mama both cried.

Europe says, “No, thank you”

Since American children started getting the chickenpox vaccine many of the reported reactions to the vaccine itself appear to be as bad—or worse—than getting the chickenpox.

Adverse events associated with the varicella vaccine include meningitis, encephalitis, and death, according to a 2022 study.

Other reported vaccine adverse effects include thrombocytopenia, pneumonia, severe rashes and accompanying skin infections, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and seizures.

So you might not be surprised to know that, unlike in America, European health authorities and doctors have not jumped on the varicella vaccination train.

In fact, only a dozen countries in Europe (fewer than a third) recommend universal vaccination for children.

What do the public health authorities in Europe know about the chickenpox vaccine that American public health authorities refuse to acknowledge?  

Bye bye chickenpox!

Once the chickenpox vaccine became required for enrollment in school, the number of chickenpox cases in America dropped.

Good news, right?

Maybe not.

While the vaccine appears to have a high efficacy rate, there are several unforeseen downsides to taking wild circulating chickenpox out of the pediatric population.

For one thing, when you’re exposed to chickenpox as a child, you have natural immunity, which usually lasts well into adulthood. This is important since this disease is almost always more serious in adults than in children.

But our immune systems need reminding.

Before the advent of the vaccine, wild chickenpox circulated freely in America, infecting children and boosting the natural immunity of the adults who’d had it as children.

The immunity of adults who’d been exposed to it as children was buttressed by periodically coming in contact with the disease.

That’s not happening anymore. This natural immunization boost is pretty much
gone.

Hello shingles!

Why is that a problem?

Because now we are seeing growing numbers of adults who had chickenpox as children getting a much more serious disease caused by the same virus: shingles.