WE DID IT! WELCOME TO THE NEW YEAR. We are already off to an exciting start. It has been our long-standing tradition to reflect on the prior year, ultimately naming a “contact lens event” of the year. We engage with our readership and editorial team, seeking nominations for events that we should consider and highlight as such, and we thank each of you for your valuable input.

What a year 2022 was…most notably, the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (although this disease will undoubtedly be with us for quite some time). I remember it well, as I am sure you do, too. March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declares COVID-19 a pandemic. Fast forward (more like slow forward) 2.5 years, President Joe Biden called the pandemic over in a Sept. 19, 2022 television interview (npr.org/2022/09/19/1123767437/joe-biden-covid-19-pandemic-over ).

However, the WHO has yet to repel the pandemic status (although Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, did state that “The world has never been in a better position to end the pandemic” in September 2022). As of writing this on Dec. 1, 2022, the WHO estimated that there have been 638,175,811 cases of COVID-19 globally, which included 6,612,970 deaths.

Despite still having to deal with the remnants of this health crisis, we have much to celebrate when it comes to the contact lens field: New contact lens entries into the marketplace. New diagnostics. New therapeutics. New evidence-based knowledge to guide our clinical decision-making.

But we saw something early in 2022 that we do not often see—a regulatory agency standing up to commercial interests in their attempts to curtail federal regulations regarding the sale of contact lenses (The Contact Lens Rule). In January 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined an online seller of direct-to-consumer contact lenses, saying that the online seller had “violated the Contact Lens Rule in several ways.” (ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/vision-path-inc-online-seller-hubble-lenses-settles-charges-it-violated-contact-lens-rule-ftc-act ). This was bold, but needed, and we celebrate the FTC for taking this action—making this the 2022 Contact Lens Event of the Year.

We at Contact Lens Spectrum are quite enthusiastic for the 2023 calendar year, and wish to thank all our readers, sponsors, patients, and colleagues as we celebrate this new year!

JASON J. NICHOLS, OD, MPH, PHD

Editor-in-Chief