Chickenpox is a viral disease that is spread very easily and is almost always benign and that is why your vaccine is always surrounded by controversy and doubts. In cases where it is complicated, usually in infants and in immunocompromised children and adults, it can generate up to 1,280 hospital admissions with complications such as otitis, pneumonia, neurological problems and has a mortality of between 4 and 15 people per year.
These data have not been sufficient to make the chickenpox vaccine subsidized by the state for young children (it is only given in older children) and so there is not much data yet. In the United States, however, they have been vaccinating older children since 1995 and have seen that thanks to the fact that siblings and other children are vaccinated for chickenpox Babies under one year of age, who cannot be vaccinated, have less risk of passing the disease.
The goal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is to ensure that there are more and more children vaccinated to reduce the number of children who suffer from it and to reduce the risks of children under 12 months. Currently recommend administer two doses of chickenpox vaccine to all children between 12 months and 12 years and to older children and adults who are not yet vaccinated and who have not passed chickenpox, precisely to avoid being caught in adulthood, when symptoms are more pronounced.
Infants under 12 months are not vaccinated because at birth they acquire immunity through maternal defenses and the vaccine does not act until those defenses disappear. However, despite having them, many children under 12 months suffer from the disease. In addition, the safety of the vaccine is not proven in babies.
To affirm that chickenpox cases are declining, a CDC team conducted a study quantifying chickenpox cases from the start of the vaccination program until 2008 in Los Angeles and western Philadelphia counties. The researchers observed that as the number of children aged 1.2 and 3 vaccinated for chickenpox increased, infections in infants decreased. In numbers, of the 16 out of every 1,000 babies suffering from the disease in 1995 it was passed to less than 2 in 1,000 in 2008.
In the words of Adriana López, co-author of the study:
During the era of prevalence (...) babies were a high risk group of serious illness. The results show that the impact of the immunization program is enormous not only in terms of reducing the disease in the vaccinated population, but also because of the protection achieved in those who cannot receive the vaccine.
If you ask me about the vaccine, tell them that I did put it on my two oldest children before Guim was born, when they were 5 and 2 years old, to prevent them from taking chickenpox and getting it from school. In any case, The decision to put it falls, logically, on each father and mother, since it is a vaccine that is not subsidized, that is bought in pharmacies and that costs almost € 70 each of the two doses (much less if you buy them in Andorra or France, although eye, these days I have learned that it is illegal to buy medicines in another country).
