@alice May I ask what the three #vaccines were?

I'm a pharmacist, and I've been a radical PRO-vaxer literally since childhood. Louis Pasteur was one of my childhood heroes. So when I got my first dose of #Shingrix a few years ago, and this brutal adjuvanted vaccine made my whole right arm turn red and warm from the injection site in the deltoid all the way down to my wrist, it didn't bother me in the least. Quite the contrary. I thought, "Good! This is exactly the red alert my immune system needs."

I knew that Shingrix was more effective than the old #Zostavax live vaccine against #shingles, which I had also gotten. Not long ago it had been thought impossible for a recombinant vaccine like Shingrix to be more effective than the best available live vaccine, but the rules are rapidly being rewritten by modern #adjuvant technology.

What I was NOT prepared for was the flood of good news about Shingrix from observational research — the exact opposite of #antivaxer paranoid fantasies. I'll be the first to admit that the picture isn't clear yet — science works by theory based on the accumulated totality of observational and experimental evidence, not by overconfident extrapolation from individual studies. But it’s looking as though Shingrix has astonishing benefits above and beyond its basic purpose of preventing shingles. And the benefits may even extend to other modern adjuvanted vaccines.

Vaccination against shingles was expected to provide some protection against #dementia, simply because herpes #zoster, the virus that causes shingles, is a known risk factor for dementia. But observational studies showed statistically that the reduction in new-onset dementia began right away — too quickly for it to be purely the result of suppression of shingles attacks, which are infrequent. And now evidence is starting to appear that suggests that Shingrix may have a general anti-aging effect through some kind of "tuning" of the immune system — as may at least some other adjuvanted vaccines.

How ironic. This is the kind of very general benefit that homeopaths and such tend to claim, dubiously, for their panaceas — and now it looks as though modern biomedical high technology has achieved it for real, without even trying.

Think about that as your immune system on red alert is making you, very temporarily, feel miserable.

@clew @gildilinie @AnnieBuddy @renata @benroyce @alice

I'm too old to have been vaccinated against #chickenpox as a child. By coincidence, I'm recovering from chickenpox right now. In adults, it's a horrible experience. Most of my torso is numb, I have bad abdominal and back pain, and I'm covered from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet in spots. Last night, I got less than three hours' sleep.

#Shingles would have been worse. I'll definitely pay for the shingles #vaccine as soon as I'm over this.

The NHS is giving free #MMR vaccines to anyone who didn't have them as a child (including me, because of my age). I had my two doses recently and I'm glad I did.