Can someone who has been vaccinated against chickenpox get shingles?
Currently available data suggest that children who have been vaccinated against chickenpox may develop shingles later in life, but they do so at lower rates than those who have been infected with wild type varicella. In a study among children with leukemia, the risk of shingles occurring in vaccine recipients was about one-third that of children who had had chickenpox. Data relating to the risk of shingles in healthy children show a similar pattern of reduced risk in vaccine recipients, but these data are limited, and they do not distinguish between shingles resulting from the varicella vaccine virus and shingles resulting from natural VZV infection as a result of varicella vaccine failure. Furthermore, since the number of older adults who have received varicella vaccine since it was licensed in 1995 is quite low, these data are only available for children, and children are generally at low risk for shingles.
