No, You Can’t Get Shingles if You’ve Never Had Chickenpox

But if you haven’t been vaccinated, you could get chickenpox from somebody with shingles

The relationship between chickenpox and shingles is a bit confusing at first. That’s because they’re caused by the same virus: varicella-zoster virus. It’s also because vaccines against both conditions are now available … but are only necessary for certain groups of people.

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We asked family medicine physician Jeffrey Brown, DO, to explain the “varicella order of operations.” He shares what you have to do to protect yourself against chickenpox and shingles, depending on your personal medical history.

The relationship between chickenpox and shingles

Up until a couple of decades ago, before there was a vaccine, almost everybody contracted chickenpox at some point during their childhood. It was like a rite of passage — a thing that happened to all kids sooner or later. Some parents actually used to have “pox parties,” where they deliberately exposed their children to somebody with the virus. In the U.S., approximately 99% of people over the age of 40 have had the virus.

“Typically, when you’re a child and you get chickenpox, your body fights off the virus,” Dr. Brown explains, “But it doesn’t get rid of it. The virus, varicella-zoster, goes into hiding somewhere at the base of a nerve in your body for years and years and just stays there quietly. We call that latency.”

Most people who get chickenpox live out the rest of their lives without the virus ever rearing its ugly head again. But for a portion of that population — about 10% — the virus reactivates as shingles.

“I almost think of shingles as being chickenpox: the sequel,” Dr. Brown says. It’s the same virus, but the symptoms are slightly different — and, because it typically strikes people over the age of 50 — it can pack an even heavier punch.

In some cases, shingles causes serious side effects like post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN), inflammation of the brain (encephalitis) and bacterial infections. Those kinds of complications are most likely in people over 70 years of age and people with compromised immune systems.

Unlike chickenpox, which is a “one and done” thing, you actually can have shingles more than once — just like a movie can have multiple sequels.

How vaccines have changed things

Chickenpox and shingles used to be facts of life. Nearly everybody got chickenpox. And shingles was a roll of the dice everybody had to take.

Today, both conditions are largely preventable, thanks to the development of vaccines:

ProQuad® and Varivax® both provide protection against chickenpox.Shingrix® is the newest vaccine against shingles and is recommended for all people over age 50 that have already had chickenpox. It’s also recommended for anybody who received a shingles vaccine before Shingrix came onto the market in 2020, because previous vaccines weren’t nearly as effective.

The advent of these vaccines means that there are a lot more people out there who have never had chickenpox. And that’s great news! But it can also make it hard to figure out which vaccines you need and which you don’t.