I honestly don’t know what to think about this story:
BOSTON (Reuters) – Merck’s chickenpox vaccine Varivax not only loses its effectiveness after a while, but it has also changed the profile of the disease in the population, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
The study confirmed what doctors widely knew — that the vaccine’s protection does not last long.
And with fewer natural cases of the disease going around, unvaccinated children or children in whom the first dose of the vaccine fails to work have been catching the highly contagious disease later in life, when the risk of severe complications is greater, they said.
“If you’re unvaccinated and you get it later in life, there’s a 20-times greater risk of dying compared to a child, and a 10 to 15 times greater chance of getting hospitalized,” said Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who worked on the study.
The continuing effect of a second shot is unknown. At this point what they seem to be suggesting is re-inoculation with a second vaccine after six years and then periodically throughout life.
Shouldn’t there be some more serious risk analysis done here? And cost-benefit analysis?
I had chickenpox as a kid; my youngest sisters had much more serious cases than I did. My wife’s case of chickenpox as a kid was so serious she had to be hospitalized.
Chickenpox for an adult is no joke. It sounds to me as though the vaccination regime is raising the likelihood of adult chickenpox. Is there something I’m missing?
I had it when a kid, too… over 50 years ago, but I remember the misery.
My son, though, got it at 17. There was an outbreak at his school, and a handful of kids spent a lousy Christmas break in India, trying not to scratch. He was a most unhappy camper. We had the doctors all over him to make sure nothing went awry.
Related, of course, is smallpox. When I was in Riyadh in 2003, during the run-up to and the early days of the Iraq War, State Dept. sent teams out to do smallpox (and other) inoculations, just in case. It turned out–much to everyone’s surprise–that the initial smallpox vaccinations we older folks had received, more than half a century earlier, were still potent. In my case, they tried three different times to get an allergenic reaction, which would indicate that immunity had expired, without success.
My father recently had a very bad case of the shingles – which is also caused by the Chickenpox virus. I wonder if this vaccine has any applicability there? The article mentions shingles, but not efficacy vs it.
I am just about old enough to remember “mumps parties” – occasions where parents deliberately exposed their kids to infection, on the basis that it was best to catch childhood diseases while a child, as they are much less severe then than while adult. Apparently the immunity lasts longer too.