Letter: the safety of herpes zoster vaccination for patients with inflammatory bowel disease being treated with anti‐TNF medications—authors’ reply

EDITORS, We would like to thank the editors for giving us the opportunity to respond to the comments by Côt e-Daigneault et al regarding our manuscript. We want to thank Côt e-Daigneault et al for appreciating the importance of this subject and wish to clarify some of the issues raised by them. Côt e-Daigneault et al are correct in stating that another complication of the vaccine is the development of varicella. In our study we used manual review of charts to assess for any potential herpes virus-related complications following vaccination. We wish to clarify that we did not observe any cases of either acute varicella or herpes zoster in the 42 days after vaccination. Moreover, we fully agree with the final statement of Côt e-Daigneault et al and have stated in our paper “it would be prudent to offer HZV to IBD patients on anti-TNF therapy on a case by case basis after a discussion of the risks and benefits with the patient”.