Vaccination After Transplant
Vaccinations after a kidney transplant — which vaccines you need, which ones to avoid, and how to plan for the flu season, Hajj, and travel.
Key Points
- Most vaccines work best when given before the transplant — keep them up to date during the work-up.
- After the transplant, wait at least three months before restarting the vaccination schedule.
- Get the modern pneumococcal vaccine — Prevnar 15 or Prevnar 20 — as a single dose, with a follow-up Pneumovax later in some patients.
- Every adult transplant recipient aged 19 and over needs the two-dose Shingrix course against shingles, with the second dose two to six months after the first.
- If you are aged 60 or over, the RSV vaccine is now recommended and is added to your plan.
- Get the inactivated flu shot every autumn — not the nasal spray. Family members and carers should do the same.
- Before any Hajj or Umrah, take the quadrivalent conjugate meningococcal vaccine (Menveo or Nimenrix) at least ten days before travel.
- Live vaccines — measles-mumps-rubella, chickenpox, yellow fever, oral typhoid, BCG — are never given after the transplant.
Clinical review
Reviewed by Dr Osama Ashry Gheith, Consultant Transplant Nephrologist. Kuwait Center for Nephrology and Kidney Transplantation (KCNKT). Mansoura Urology and Nephrology Center, Egypt. Reviewed 1 August 2026.
About the Transplant Patient Portal
This chapter is part of ASNRT's bilingual (Arabic / English) transplant patient-education portal — 14 clinical chapters covering kidney transplantation from preparation through long-term follow-up, plus decision-aid tools for Ramadan fasting, drug-food interactions, and red-flag symptom triage.
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