COVID-19 Vaccine Concerns: Fact or Fiction?

Barbari, Antoine

One year has elapsed since a team of Chinese scientists reported the first case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China on January 8, 2020, after sequencing the first viral genetic material. Since then, many vaccines were rushed into testing, bypassing animal experimentations, with more than 200 pharma companies in different countries declaring the development of different vaccines, each with their own strategy for generating immunity, despite the arguments of many infectious disease experts that 18 months for a first vaccine is an incredibly aggressive schedule because it takes an average of 10 years to develop a vaccine. Ten vaccine candidates have already entered phase 3 clinical trials in humans. These vaccines rely on different types of technology, the most innovative of which use the genetic material messenger RNA. Many provocative questions and genuine concerns have been raised, such as short durations of efficacy and safety follow-ups, lack of identified correlates of protection, morbidity and mortality cases reported shortly after vaccination, uncertainties regarding the risk of enhanced disease on exposure to the virus in the long-term, the possibility of viral transmission after vaccination, the reported reduced efficacies of these vaccines against new variants, the efficacy and safety of these vaccines in the previously excluded subgroups (such as children, pregnant women, the frail elderly high-risk population, and immunocompromised individuals), the unknown risk of immunogenicity-induced autoimmune diseases, cancer and chronic inflammation, the risk of genome transformation (mainly in the presence of reverse transcriptase), and finally the potential coercion that may be imposed by either public or private sectors on citizens to receive the vaccine. Many plausible questions are apparent, with no clear and convincing answers.