On November 14, the U.K. government announced that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) had recommended a vaccine against chickenpox (varicella) should be added to routine childhood immunisation programme. The vaccine is to be offered to all children in two doses, at 12 and 18 months of age. A final decision to introduce the vaccine has not been taken yet.
JCVI’s recommendation comes nearly three decades after the U.S. introduced it in 1996, and a body of evidence emphasising the benefits of varicella vaccination. While chickenpox in children is most often relatively mild, some can develop complications, including bacterial infections, and in rare cases can cause encephalitis, lung inflammation, and even stroke; it can also rarely cause deaths.
Even when the disease clears, the virus stays dormant in the body and can get reactivated to cause herpes zoster (shingles), especially in adults. Exposure to the virus through children with chickenpox was expected to boost the immunity in adults and thus reduce the risk of shingles. It was theorised that vaccination of children will lead to loss of natural immunity boosting in adults, thus leading to significant increase in shingles cases. This was one of the reasons why routine administration of the vaccine in children did not begin in the U.K. earlier.
