An NBC News headline published Oct. 2 says shingles cases are “dropping among people who got chickenpox vaccine.” The Epic Research report behind it looked at birth years and age bands, not vaccination records.
What Epic Research analyzed
Epic Research examined the records of more than 85 million U.S. adults “from two different angles.” One tracked the share of adults diagnosed with shingles from January 2019 to June 2026, grouped by birth-year cohort. The other tracked new cases among adults 18 to 49 over time.
The Cosmos records come from all 50 U.S. states, Canada, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Two teams worked independently and, in Epic’s words, “came to similar conclusions.”
What it found
The share of adults diagnosed with shingles from 2019 to mid-2026 rose steeply with age, from about 7 per 10,000 among people born from 2006 to 2008 to 182 per 10,000 among those born from 1968 to 1975.
The largest step down came between the 1991-1995 and 1996-2000 birth cohorts. There the share fell from 45.5 to 17.3 per 10,000, which Epic calls a 62% decline. Epic notes that the break “coincides with the first birth cohorts eligible for routine childhood chickenpox vaccination.”
Among adults 18 to 35, rates fell between 2019 and 2026; among 25- to 29-year-olds they dropped by more than 50%, to roughly 3 per 10,000.
Headline versus study
NBC’s first line says the chickenpox vaccine “appears to protect against shingles.” NBC also says younger adults “are more likely to have been vaccinated,” which is an inference, not something Epic measured. Epic, however, wrote that it “did not evaluate whether patients had received the childhood chickenpox vaccine.” The analysis compares generations. It does not compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
The authors also say part of the decline likely reflects those cohorts aging in, meaning those age bands increasingly consist of people born after the vaccine was introduced, and that the 1995 rollout included catch-up vaccination for susceptible older children, so “this was a gradual transition rather than a sharp birth-year cutoff.”
Caveats the authors give
Epic lists its own limits. The report says the 2020-2021 COVID-19 disruption and the shift to telehealth “may distort the trend during the reporting window.” Because the rate is measured among patients seen in outpatient care, the 2020-2021 drop in routine visits and their return “can move the measured rate up and then down on their own.”
The report also shows the measured rate rising among adults 40 to 49 between 2019 and 2026, to about 16 per 10,000 among women 45 to 49, and says part of that rebound “likely reflects pandemic-era health care use rather than true incidence.” NBC, which describes a rise among people 35 and over, reports “no clear evidence for what’s causing the rise in this group” and says experts suggest possible causes; Dr. Sharon Curhan, who was not involved in the study, told NBC that before the vaccine, adults were exposed to children with chickenpox, “so that was like a booster for them.” The report does not address these.
An earlier analysis
Epic cites a 2022 analysis in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that used a claims database covering 1998 to 2019. Its abstract says that among people aged 1 to 29, shingles incidence “later declined in a stepwise pattern once each age group was comprised of persons born in the postvaccine period.” The authors said their results do not support earlier modeling predictions that vaccination would raise shingles rates among adults who previously had chickenpox.
What remains unknown
NBC reports that shingles is typically rare in people younger than 50, so, in NBC’s paraphrase of Epic author Kersten Bartelt, the data cannot prove whether the protection will last as they age. The report does not show whether vaccinated individuals had fewer cases, how long any effect lasts, or what is behind the rise in the 40s.