Christopher Shaw

"Two key figures at the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research are editor-in-chief John Oller and senior editor Christopher Shaw. Oller, a former professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has a doctorate in applied linguistics. His opposition to vaccines appears to have developed through an interest in autism and its possible causes. Together with his son — a professor at Texas A&M University — Oller wrote a book on autism, published in 2009. It contained a foreword by Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor who wrongly claimed to have found a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, which is used to protect against measles, mumps and rubella. Embarrassingly, a few months after their book appeared, Wakefield was struck off the medical register in Britain for falsifying his research. Oller is also active in the creationist movement, which claims the Bible’s account of the origins of the universe is factually accurate. He has written articles for the Institute for Creation Research (where he is listed as a member of the technical advisory board) and for Answers in Genesis, an organization that seeks to “expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas” and claims the Earth is only about 6,000 years old. In 2011, Oller sued university colleagues, claiming he had been marginalized and discriminated against because of his views on both creationism and a supposed connection between vaccines and autism. His claim was rejected. Shaw, the other key figure at the journal, is a professor in the department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of British Columbia. In 2011, together with colleague Lucija Tomljenovic, he authored two highly controversial papers (here and here) questioning the safety of aluminum adjuvants which, since the 1930s, have been added to many vaccines to increase their effectiveness. Shaw’s papers caused enough of a stir for the World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety to review them. It concluded that they were seriously flawed. Shaw has also caused trouble for several publishers, as a search of the Retraction Watch Database reveals. One of his articles about adjuvants in vaccines was retracted after publication by the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry. The Vaccine journal retracted another, citing concerns about its “seriously flawed” methodology. In 2017, the journal Toxicology published — and later withdrew — a letter from Shaw and others that accused two fellow scientists of lying. Also in 2017, the Open Access Library Journal published an article co-authored by Oller, Shaw and others that suggested the WHO had operated a secret birth-control program in Kenya a few years earlier. Tetanus vaccines given to women were said to have been laced with a hormone, hCG, in order to cause miscarriages and infertility. Their article was basically a scare story. Rumors about the vaccine — repeatedly denied by the WHO — had circulated in various countries since the 1990s. In Kenya’s case, they were spread mainly by the Catholic Church. A scientist named John Broughall called for the article to be retracted, saying its contents “could best be described as a disproven conspiracy theory.” Oller, Shaw and the other authors then withdrew it but published it again in the same journal later. They continued to defend it in an “addendum” published by their own journal in 2020. In 2022, Shaw and other anti-vaxxers joined forces with Assad’s defenders to produce a collection of articles about COVID-19 for Propaganda in Focus. These portrayed efforts to control the virus as a sinister ploy to deceive and manipulate the public. One of the articles, co-authored by Broudy and Valerie Kyrie (described as a psychologist and “independent researcher”), refers to the pandemic as “a manufactured global health emergency with pseudo-medical martial law.” It continues: “The deployment of the Covid-19 crisis has served as the means by which to manufacture consent to a new social, economic, political and religious order, known variously as the Great Reset, Fourth Industrial Revolution (or New World Order).” In a separate article, Shaw claims that “most of the world’s population” has been harmed by this, or soon will be. Humanity, he writes, “has become poorer and immeasurably less free, not to mention that those who have been ‘fully’ vaccinated and even required to take ‘booster’ shots may suffer life-long health consequences.” In an article titled “Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste,” Robinson asserts that “any concern with respect to the necessity of propaganda to save lives was either secondary to, or otherwise entirely irrelevant to, the promotion of political and economic agendas entirely disconnected to any substantive public health concerns.” https://newlinesmag.com/argument/friends-in-strange-places/