Immune Systems Advisor

Getting the recombinant zoster (shingles) vaccine (RZV), or Shingrix, if you have had an ocular shingles event, may increase your risk of experiencing a second event, a recent study shows. Ocular shingles refers to all shingles that manifest in the eye area. Milder cases of ocular shingles typically occur near the eyelids, while more severe cases may cause inflammation inside the eyes and potentially lead to blindness. Man with scarring from shingles on June 21, 2022. (Meiling Lee/The Epoch Times) Researchers at the University of California (UC)–San Francisco found that  (JAMA), compared to unvaccinated people with a history of ocular shingles, those who receive the RZV have 1.64 times the risk of developing ocular shingles again. “It’s not a huge increased risk,” lead author Dr. Nisha Acharya, director of the Uveitis and Ocular Inflammatory Disease Service at UC–San Francisco, told The Epoch Times. “To my knowledge, it’s the first data that we have on risks of reactivation followi...

Doctors and scientists are seeing an increase in the reactivation of the chickenpox virus, known as varicella-zoster virus (VZV), following the COVID-19 injections. The chickenpox virus is one of the eight herpes viruses known to infect humans. After a person contracts and recovers from chickenpox, the virus never leaves the body but lies dormant in the nervous system years later until it gets reactivated as shingles, or herpes zoster (HZ). Federal health authorities claim that there’s no correlation between COVID-19 injections and shingles, but studies show that there is a higher incidence of shingles in people who’ve received the vaccine. Israel was one of the earlier countries to publish a case series of six women (out of 491 participants) with an autoimmune disorder who developed shingles 3 to 14 days after receiving the first or second dose of Pfizer COVID-19 shot. None of the 99 participants in the control group developed shingles. The study was published in the journal...