Medpundit thinks so:
What does this mean? It means we’ll be giving boosters. Good for Merck. That doubles the demand for their vaccine. And if it turns out the booster’s immunity fades with time, too, there will be another booster. It also means that we will probably see an increase in the incidence of chickenpox again after a steady decline over the past ten years. Which will be all the more reason to promote the booster.Selling the vaccine to the infectious disease community was truly a golden goose for Merck. It remains to be seen whether it was such a good thing for the rest of us.
Flea is more blunt. He says the vaccine sucks.
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Each time an adult is exposed to a child with chickenpox, the adult receives an immunological boost that helps postpone or suppress the reactivation of herpes zoster (shingles). Universal varicella vaccination has severely decreased the exogenous boosting that previously occurred naturally in the community, thus the incidence of shingles among adults will rise. Also, the effectiveness of the varicella vaccine decreases over time, thus creating the potential for much more serious chickenpox disease among adults. More information is available at http://www.drGoldmanONLINE.com
Previously, over 20 years in Japan, only 1 out of 5 children were vaccinated. The 4 out of 5 remaining children that went on to contract natural chickenpox provided an immunologic boost to those that received the varicella vaccination, so that vacinees remained protected. This is not the case in the U.S. were every healthy child is vaccinated. There are no longer exogenous exposures to children with natural chickenpox to provide a subclinical immunological boost to protect against varicella. The live virus is also creating mutated varicella-zoster virus strains, increasing the number of individuals that contract varicella twice (due to exposure to heterologous strains).
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