Brave New World: Omens and Opportunities in the Age of COVID-19

In this inaugural issue of IJVTPR, the authors have focused on a variety of themes that are intended to highlight some of the ongoing controversies in the vaccine literature, controversies that have been made all the more acute by the emergence of COVID-19. With this pandemic have come societal disruptions that have caused governments around the globe to move rapidly to “state of exception” measures. It is at times such as this, that independent scholarly research is most urgently needed. The current issue is our opening salvo that attempts to bring rigorous independent and unbiased research to the subject of vaccine safety and analysis. The article by Shaw looks at how the process that has governed scientific review for centuries — peer review — has been corrupted in an attempt to sanitize the literature in order to remove studies that do not conform to a corporate line. It seems certain that in the new age of COVID-19, such measures will only increasingly harm and obscure honest science. The paper by Oller et al. follows up on the 2017 article about the apparent distribution of a World Health Organization anti-fertility vaccine represented as a prophylactic for maternal and neonatal tetanus. The article by David Lewis takes an important alternative look at potential etiological factors that might contribute to the rising prevalence of autism, factors that are not per se the direct result of vaccination but that involve some of the pathogens and components from that industry. Next, Sin Hang Lee takes an intensive critical look at the components in Gardasil9. It is a vaccine deploying gene-edited recombinant capsid L1 proteins converted to virus like particles to stimulate immunity against human papilloma viruses of types 6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58. In theory it also requires one or more strong adjuvants to jump start the generation of antibodies against the various viruses. Because Lee’s paper addresses an application of gene editing research in vaccine development, it adumbrates our next issue in which we intend to address so-called “dual use” and “gain of function” research with potential pandemic pathogens preceding the present COVID-19 pandemic.