The New Shingles Vaccine!

There’s a new shingles vaccine coming to market, and it looks to be awesome with just a little bit of awful. Stick around and I’ll tell you more.

What is the New Shingles Vaccine?

So late in October, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the ACIP, which is part of the CDC, gave its recommendation to the new shingles vaccine which will be sold under the name Shingrix. So this vaccine looks really good. A lot of you know about the current shingles vaccine. When it came out a little over a decade ago, it was a big step forward because before that, we didn’t have anything to reduce the attack rate from shingles. But with the one that came out ten years ago, we could cut the attack rate in half. That’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect. Still half of the people who were going to get shingles would get it anyway. We also learned that the durability of its protection is kind of okay, but it faded away after five or six years.

So this new vaccine that’s coming out, Shingrix, looks really good. Its protection is in the 90s percent, and as you get older, which is when the current vaccine really doesn’t work all that well, the new vaccine retains that same 90-some percent protection. So shingles is going to substantially decrease with this new vaccine. It’s great and it looks like it has good durability as well, so that’s also going to be important.

Shingles Vaccine Side Effects

The awful part is that there are a lot of side effects. Arm pain is very common, you feel lousy after you get it, you get body aches and some low-grade fevers; you just don’t feel very good. So in this case you’re going to pay for what you get, and you get to come back and do it again two months later. It’s a two-shot series.

When Will it Be Available?

So it’s got some downsides and side effects, but it looks to be great in terms of effectiveness. I think this one’s a big step forward. Look for it to become available in pharmacies and doctors’ offices perhaps somewhere in the wintertime or next springtime. I have no idea what it’s going to cost or what insurance coverage will be like, but it’s coming.

By the way, what’s up with the name shingles and what does that have to do with the roof of my house? Absolutely nothing! The name shingles comes from the Latin word cingula which means a belt. As a lot of you know, shingles will often attack, wrapping around the chest or around the abdomen, sort of like a belt, thus the name cingula which gets sort of transliterated into shingles. Very interesting.

For more videos, check out the website at sentinelprimarycare.com. For Sentinel Primary Care in Brier Creek in Raleigh, I’m Dr. Patrick O’Connell.