Offer coverage for shingles vaccine

Re: HIV-blocking drug to be offered free, Dec. 29

The revelation that the government will commence financing the costs of an HIV blocker, a generic form of the drug Truvada may or may not be praiseworthy.

That the drug is only partially successful leads to the possibility of reverse consequences — an increase in viral transmission through false confidence. That those most at risk can be counted on to fill prescriptions and take daily dosages is a further concern leading to similar consequences.

And it is upsetting — at least to me — that the government refuses to reveal the cost of the drug. (“We got a discount of more that 75 per cent,” the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIVAIDS boasts). Twenty five per cent of a lot can still be pretty much.

Nobody disputes the ultimate moral concern. But it should be noted that HIV is a disease transmitted primarily through reckless activities preventable through wellunderstood practices: safe sex and clean needles.

Another disease, which has never received the popular press of HIV, infects up to one in four seniors and is markedly not preventable by the simple device of responsible activity.

There is, however, a private-pay vaccine available for shingles — at some $200 per pop (likely less than the monthly cost of the generic form of Truvada).

Is it not time for Adrian Dix and the Ministry of Health to include this vaccine in the Pharmacare cornucopia as an effort to eliminate a disease which has already reached epidemic proportions among a certain class of the population?

Joshua Kline, Vancouver