New shingles vaccine cuts cases by 90% in people over 80, Spain data shows

In the spring of 2024, epidemiologists in Spain's Murcia region began comparing two populations: people over eighty who had received the new shingles vaccine, and those who had not. What they found was striking. Among the vaccinated, shingles cases dropped to 202 per 100,000 people. Among the unvaccinated, the number climbed to 1,705 per 100,000. That was an 88 percent reduction—nearly nine out of ten cases prevented by a single injection.

These are the first real-world numbers Spain has collected since the government began publicly funding the Shingrix vaccine in late 2022. The data comes from a region of 1.61 million people, and it offers the clearest picture yet of what the vaccine can actually do. For people turning sixty-five, the protection was somewhat less dramatic but still substantial: a fifty-four percent reduction in cases. The difference between the two age groups surprised the researchers themselves, and they are still working to understand why the vaccine performs so much better in the very old.

Shingles is not a minor affliction. The disease, known colloquially in Spanish as "culebrilla" for the ribbon-like rash it produces, causes intense pain that can linger for months or even years. In up to fifteen percent of patients, the pain becomes chronic, a condition called postherpetic neuralgia that can devastate quality of life. Across Spain, more than seventy-five thousand people develop shingles each year, and the number has been climbing steadily for more than two decades as the population ages. Among people over eighty, the disease strikes roughly one in fifty annually.

The virus behind shingles is the same one that causes chickenpox. In people who had chickenpox as children—which is nearly everyone—the virus remains dormant in nerve tissue for decades. As the immune system weakens with age, or sometimes due to other illnesses or medications, the virus can reactivate. There is no cure, only management of the symptoms.

Getting the vaccine to this point required patience and money. Shingrix, made by the pharmaceutical company GSK, costs 120 euros per dose, and two doses are needed for full protection. When the vaccine first became available, global supplies were tight. The Spanish government and regional health authorities eventually agreed to concentrate vaccination efforts on two groups: people turning sixty-five and people turning eighty each year. This targeted approach made the economics work for public health systems stretched thin across the country.

Murcia's epidemiologists arrived at their findings by linking vaccination records with disease surveillance data. The work was technically straightforward but valuable: they could see, in concrete numbers, what happened when people got vaccinated and what happened when they did not. In 2024, among sixty-five-year-olds, vaccinated people had 487 cases per 100,000, compared to 1,068 among the unvaccinated. The researchers acknowledge these are raw figures that may contain some bias and confounding factors, but preliminary 2025 data suggests the pattern holds.

The implications are substantial. In Murcia alone, vaccination prevented seventy-two cases among sixty-five-year-olds in 2024, despite vaccination coverage sitting below forty percent. If every eligible person had been vaccinated, the number would have risen to 198 prevented cases in a single year. At age eighty, the figures were thirty-seven and 120 respectively. As new cohorts reach these ages year after year, the cumulative benefit compounds. Jaime Pérez Martín, who heads the regional health authority's prevention service and leads Spain's vaccination association, calls it an enormous accumulated health benefit. He also notes that regional governments made significant financial commitments to this program, and now they are beginning to see the payoff.

Nationally, the picture is still incomplete. Coverage remains around forty percent in most regions, and the vaccine has only recently entered the public system. The incidence of shingles was already rising before vaccination began, so detecting a national decline will take time. Researchers at Spain's Carlos III Health Institute say the Murcia data is encouraging but that more time and larger studies are needed to see the full picture. GSK, in a written statement, noted that other countries administering the vaccine have seen effectiveness rates between seventy-five and eighty-five percent in real-world conditions, somewhat lower than the ninety-plus percent achieved in controlled clinical trials but consistent with what happens when any vaccine moves from the laboratory to the population at large.