Um... No. The Singles Vaccine Is NOT Cost Effective

Earlier this week, I emailed about how mass vaccination for varicella (chicken pox) has merely shifted the risk burden away from those in whom it is generally well tolerated onto those for whom there are much greater risks of complications. Consequently, according to one study by a former CDC researcher, public vaccine policy has increased health care costs.

In other words, the varicella vaccine is less than useless. Far from creating herd immunity, as Aaron Carroll in the New York Times claims, it destroys the natural herd immunity that existed prior to the introduction of the vaccine.

Curious what other nonsense the Times has published so far this year about vaccines, I did a quick search and two highly relevant articles about shingles came up: "New Shingles Vaccine Is Cost Effective", published January 4, and "Why You Should Get the New Shingles Vaccine", April 9.

The claim made in the first headline is false.

Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox, reactivated later in life if sufficient immunity isn't maintained. By destroying natural herd immunity, the varicella vaccine has increased the incidence of shingles.

So how does the medical establishment respond? Why, even more vaccines, this time to supposedly protect against shingles!

Naturally, the idea to just stop causing the problem in the first place by throwing away money on the varicella vaccine never crosses the minds of the faithful adherents to the vaccine religion.

So, given what we know about the drain on our economy from the varicella vaccine, how can the singles vaccine possibly be "cost effective" compared with just not vaccinating?

Well, it can't. Reading the Times article, it becomes immediately apparent that by "Cost Effective" they really just mean "More Cost Effective Than the Old Vaccine". Of course, just because the new vaccine might be more cost effective than the old vaccine doesn't mean that it's cost effective.

The Times headline is simply a reflection of the extraordinary cognitive dissonance that is so pervasive when it comes to the subject of vaccines.

The same cognitive dissonance is again on display in that second Times article, which explains that before the vaccine, pretty much everybody was exposed to the virus in their childhood, but that the CDC is recommending everyone aged 50 or older get the new vaccine despite the high probability that they acquired immunity to it early in their lives. Then the Times offers this mind-blowing example of cognitive dissonance (bold emphasis added):

Got that? In other words, people who were vaccinated in their childhood and who were therefore deprived of the opportunity to acquire natural immunity are at greater risk of developing shingles.

Which makes perfect sense, given that natural immunity in the pre-vaccine era was generally considered to be lifelong, whereas the immunity conferred by the vaccine is known to wane over time. That's why the CDC in 2006 recommended adding a "booster" shot to the childhood schedule.

Furthermore, in the pre-vaccine era, older people were protected by frequent re-exposure to the virus, a natural "booster" that kept them protected from shingles by maintaining immunity.

So it's no coincidence that the year after adding the booster shot, the shingles vaccine was also introduced! The shingles vaccine became "necessary" because of mass vaccination for chicken pox.

Nevertheless, immediately after making that admission, the the Times adds:

Huh?

So let's think about this for a moment...

The Times had just admitted that getting vaccinated as a child makes you "susceptible to shingles" later in life. Yet the very next sentence in the article states the literal opposite.

Cognitive dissonance!

How can both of these statements possibly be true? Naturally, they can't. So, which one actually makes sense?! The first one does, obviously, for the reasons just explained. Whereas, what sense does the second statement make?! Why, it makes no sense at all!

Now, it is true that children who've been naturally infected are at higher risk of developing shingles in childhood than vaccinated children. But this is precisely because mass vaccination has eliminated the frequent re-exposure required to maintain immunity.

Children wouldn't be at such risk for shingles today in the first place if it wasn't for mass vaccination. It didn't used to be a disease children were generally at risk for because virtually every child gained and maintained natural immunity!

Essentially, it is not the unvaccinated who pose a risk to the vaccinated by circulating the virus, but the vaccinated who pose a risk to the unvaccinated by not circulating the virus.

That's something the Times author evidently couldn't wrap her mind around, so she just tried to B.S. her way out of the logical corollary of her own admission about the effect of vaccination in shingles risk by immediately contradicting herself and falsely claiming vaccination reduces shingles risk. Evidently, to sustain her own faith-based adherence to the vaccine religion, she simply made it up.

To recap, instead of just allowing children to become exposed to the virus and to gain natural immunity to the generally benign disease, the CDC implemented a policy of mass vaccination, thus shifting the risk burden and increasing the incidence of the worse disease, shingles. When it became obvious that CDC's initial assumption that the vaccine would confer lifelong immunity was false, they just added a second shot to the schedule, as well as recommending a new shingles vaccine for adults.

All of this, of course, is just flushing money down the toilet. It's no different than a doctor prescribing a drug to treat a symptom for a disease that could have been cured by a change of diet, and then prescribing another drug to treat the side-effects of the first drug, and then another, and another, and another....

The pharmaceutical companies rake in the profits while the population suffers and experiences a net decrease in their standard of living due to all the wasted spending -- dollars that could have otherwise be put to more efficient use.