One of the reasons many people oppose the Covid injection is because of the reported use of aborted fetal cell lines in varying degrees. This is one of my reasons (there are others as outlined in this series). Before we can start this discussion we need to be clear on the facts about vaccines and the abortion connection. First, not all vaccines are reported as connected to abortion but many are. Second, the use of them varies between each individual vaccine. Nebraska Medicine inform us:
When it comes to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, fetal cell line HEK 293 was used during the research and development phase. All HEK 293 cells are descended from tissue taken from a 1973 abortion that took place in the Netherlands. Using fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness and safety of medications is common practice, because they provide a consistent and well-documented standard.
You asked, we answered: Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal cells? August 18th 2021 https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-do-the-covid-19-vaccines-contain-aborted-fetal-cells
Meredith Wadman, writing in Science Magazine, informs us:
One of the Warp Speed candidates, made by Janssen Research & Development, uses PER.C6 cells. The second, from University of Oxford researchers and AstraZeneca, uses HEK-293 cells…
Science, 5th June 2020. https://www.science.org/content/article/abortion-opponents-protest-covid-19-vaccines-use-fetal-cells
The Science magazine explains that PER.C6 was “developed from retinal cells from an 18-week-old fetus aborted in 1985.” This is different to the other vaccines which tissue from an aborted fetus from 1973. The “fact-checkers” (who exist to “correct” people like me) remind us that the aborted tissue is not in the end product but was just part of the research and development phase. For the sake of argument, let us grant this to be true. If this is true then it raises a lot of ethical questions. If it is not true and it is in the end product then it raises more ethical questions. I want to keep the discussion simple and focused so l am happy to agree on the bare minimum.
One would expect churchmen to be concerned about the use of aborted fetal tissue in Covid vaccine development. Despite this, many have argued that it is acceptable to take the Covid vaccine. Others have gone even further by telling me that it is our “moral duty” take this vaccine. In doing so, they assault freedom of conscience (something which churchmen have themselves been keen to defend when they protested against Sunday trading, women preachers and same sex marriage). Their argument is that the the abortions were a crime that happened long ago and we can’t do anything to change that now. They argue that we should just accept the benefits because our refusal would jeopardize more lives. Both their premise and their conclusion, in my view, is completely wrong.
First, I will address the belief that more people will die if they don’t take the vaccine. This ignores the fact that Covid 19 has a survival rate of over 98% and it ignores the fact that the vaccine is ineffective. I have gone into detail about this in my articles on masks (Part 2) and my article “Why I am Not Taking the Covid vaccine.” I know many people personally who have taken the injection and were still diagnosed as Covid. I will also address another objection: Pro-vaxxers point out that many Christian parents who protest against the Covid injection were happy to inject their children with the MMR vaccine or take medical drugs that also use fetal lines. This is a valid point but two wrongs don’t make a right. I would argue that we all should have objected to the MMR vaccine. In fact, this is one reason why we are having this dispute over Covid vaccine ethics. If we had protested then and been successful then we would not be in this position now.
John Stevens, the National Director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, articles an argument for Christians taking the Covid vaccine:
Historical moral purism is an impossibility. This is true of many medical and scientific advances which had their origins in warfare or appalling human rights abuse. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious allies took advantage of the data obtained by Nazi and Japanese experiments on their prisoners. The researchers in the notorious Japanese Unit 731 were given immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the Americans in return for the data they had gathered. In the past, medical research – including the testing of vaccines – was conducted unethically on prisoners and the poor.
This is not to justify such wicked actions, but rather to make the point that it becomes impossible in a fallen world to be insulated from all the benefits that might derive from evil that has been done in the past. There is a difference between the direct benefit of doing evil and the indirect results of evil having been done.
FIEC Website, Responding to the Ethics of the Covid Vacciine: https://fiec.org.uk/resources/responding-to-the-ethics-of-the-covid-vaccine, 2nd February 2021
I would have more sympathy for the above argument if the following was true: As a society we recognised that abortion was evil and we abolished it. Governments made it illegal and they forced pharmaceutical companies to develop their products without utilising fetal cell lines. As a result, we have medical products that are now free from this and this is the way forward in the future. If this was the case then Steven’s argument against “historical moral purism” would have more weight. Sadly this is not the case! Abortions are still legal, they are still being done routinely and vaccine companies depend upon it for their profit and survival . This is even admitted by National Geographic and John Hopkins University:
“So many people don’t realize how important fetal cell lines are to develop life-saving medicines and vaccines that they rely on every day,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Their use in developing COVID-19 vaccines isn’t anything different or special.”
Here are the facts about fetal cell lines and COVID-19 vaccines, November 19th 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/here-are-the-facts-about-fetal-cell-lines-and-covid-19-vaccines
In response to campaigners who argue that there are more advanced and more ethical ways to conduct research, the NIH responds:
But supporters of the research counter that fetal tissue is legally obtained, that it would otherwise be destroyed, that such work has already led to major medical advances and that, if there were better alternatives, they would turn to them. “Fetal tissue is a flexible, less-differentiated tissue. It grows readily and adapts to new environments, allowing researchers to study basic biology or use it as a tool in a way that can’t be replicated with adult tissue,” says Carrie Wolinetz, the NIH’s associate director for science policy…”“Human fetal tissue is likely never going to be replaced in some areas of research, particularly relative to fetal development”.
Nature Magazine, The Truth About Fetal Tissue Research 7th December 2015 https://www.nature.com/articles/528178a
Pro-vaccine researchers clearly have no intention of stopping the use of fetal research and it supports the observation of an ongoing industry in this area. Dr. Alvin Wong investigated this to address the associated ethical concerns:
Furthermore, there seems to be an ongoing industry in this area, where obtaining fetal tissue from routine abortions becomes a standard procedure. The use of aborted fetuses in the development of cell lines had begun as early as the sixties, looking at the well-known WI-38 and MRC-5 lines. The WI-38 cell line was developed in July 1962 from lung tissue taken from a therapeutically aborted fetus of about three months’ gestational age, while the MRC-5 cell line was developed in September 1966 from lung tissue taken from a fourteen-week-old fetus aborted for psychiatric reasons from a twenty-seven-year-old physically healthy woman. The likelihood that the source of HEK 293 was a direct abortion must be considered in this context. In short, the possibility that the HEK 293 kidney cells come from a directly procured and deliberately willed abortion is extremely high.
THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC BIOETHICS QUARTERLY, The Ethics of HEK p475-476
The reference to the “ongoing industry” of procuring fetal tissue from “deliberately willed abortions” raises a lot of ethical questions. The WI-38 cell line is used in the MMR vaccines and the MRC-5 is used in some Hepatitis vaccines and a useful table is found on the CDC website. Other sources confirm:
Two cell lines, MRC-5 and WI-38, both derived from elective abortions performed in Europe in the early 1960s, have been used as cell substrates in vaccine manufacture. Four vaccines continue to require the use of these cell lines: varicella, rubella, hepatitis A, and one of the rabies vaccines. Human fetal cells were valuable in vaccine research because they support the growth of many human viruses and are sterile; they were first used at around the time that researchers found that primary monkey kidney cells were contaminated with SV40 virus.
Plotkin’s Vaccines, Frank Destefano, … Allison Fisher, Seventh Edition 2018. Elsevier Inc. Cited by Science Direct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/wi-38
An elective abortion is also known as a routine abortion. It is one that has been chosen consciously and deliberately as opposed to one that is necessitated by medical emergency. In his analysis, Wong referenced a now archived FDA committee briefing document which enquired about HEK-293. The main speaker and author Dr. Van Der Eb who stated:
So the kidney material, the fetal kidney material was as follows. The kidney of the fetus was with an unknown family history, was obtained in 1972 probably. The precise date is not known anymore. The fetus, as far as I can remember was completely normal. Nothing was wrong. The reasons for the abortion were unknown to me. I probably knew it at that time, but it got lost, all this information.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170516050447/https://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/01/transcripts/3750t1_01.pdf
To be fair, he was in his sixties when he said this and it was 30 years after the event happened. He was quite candid about other abortion practices in the same address:
So I isolated retina from a’fetus, from a healthy fetus as far as could be seen, of 18 weeks old. There was nothing special with a family history or the pregnancy was completely normal up to the 18 weeks, and it turned out to be a socially indicated abortus’, abortus provocatus, and that was simply because the woman wanted to get rid of the fetus.
So the surgeon admits that he has performed elective abortions and this was more than likely the case with the HEK-293 fetal cell line. This confirms exactly what Alvin Wong has said: There is an ongoing pattern of routine, elective abortions where “the woman simply wanted to get rid of the fetus”. It also gives weight to his statement that “the possibility that the HEK 293 kidney cells come from a directly procured and deliberately willed abortion is extremely high”
I had one Christian friend say to me “I am 100% against abortion. I am not happy about having to take an abortion-tainted Covid injection but what can I do? It’s not as if we are murdering him over and over again!” The fact is that the abortion industry is murdering people continually and the vaccine companies are utilising the results continually. That Christian who who claims to be “100% against abortion” is making a false claim and not being honest with himself. He will not actively do anything to campaign against abortion, he will accept the next abortion-tainted vaccine that comes along a few months later, he will accept another one after that and he will continue this cycle. After several rounds, his protest “I am not happy about this but I am powerless to do anything” will wear thin. What would happen to these companies if abortion was made illegal?
I will address a very feeble argument from Dr David K. Vallance who argues that it is the moral duty of all Christians to take the vaccine:
The abortions that gave rise to cell cultures were indeed tragic wrongs. However, a great deal of unintentional but life-saving good has grown from these deaths. To refuse the blessings that have arisen from these cell lines dishonors the memory of these infants. Imagine this scenario: A young girl with a fatal gunshot wound lies in an ER trauma bay on life support. Just as a physician solemnly pronounces her brain-dead, a call comes from the next room that a second child urgently needs a heart transplant. Is it wrong to donate the heart from the brain-dead child because she was murdered. Obviously not—the girl’s tragic death would no longer be utterly in vain. We must recognize the blatant moral difference between this scenario and deliberately murdering a person specifically to harvest an organ for transplantation.
Heaven4Sure. I’m a Christian – Why Should I get a Covid Vaccine. January 11th 2021 https://heaven4sure.com/2021/01/11/im-a-christian-why-should-i-get-a-covid-19-vaccine/
This is a false comparison. Doctors performing an abortion actually are “deliberately murdering a person” The mother also pre-booked the appointment with the intention to kill her child. The vaccine manufacturers will pay for the “by-product” by arrangement. So while they may not do it to harvest organs, they sell the end products and make a lucrative industry out of it. In contrast, the doctor operating on a girl suffering from a gunshot wound is trying to save her life. Since when did vaccine manufacturers use human tissue from people who have died by accident in emergency wards? Elsewhere in the article Vallance dismisses the ethical concerns by saying that the abortion would have happened anyway. Yes, they happen because pro-vaxxers like himself support the vaccine industry which routinely and continually profits from this evil.
Vallance continues:
Current U.S. law and medical ethics boards do not allow this kind of harvesting to happen today. Further, the mothers in question opted to have abortions for (unjustified) personal reasons, not for the purpose of donating fetal tissue for research. They had no notion that scientists were going to grow cell lines from their babies that over decades would lead to many advances in biology and medicine, including life-saving vaccines and revolutionary “biologic” agents now widely used in all medical specialties.
I really question this. Meredith Wadman, writing in the Scientific American, tells us:
In the United States, this [aborted fetal tissue] is collected at medical centres and clinics that perform abortions under a patchwork of laws and regulations governing consent, tissue collection and transfer (see ‘Fetal tissue and the law’). US law says that clinics can recover “reasonable payments” to offset the costs of providing the tissue, but it makes it a felony to profit from doing so. Planned Parenthood officials say that its clinics obtain full and informed consent from women choosing to donate fetal remains for research, and the organization announced in October that its clinics will no longer recover costs of $45–60 per specimen for collecting the tissue.
Scientific American, 9th December 2015: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-fetal-tissue-research/
So research clinics are currently obtaining informed consent from women who choose to have abortions and donate the fetal tissue for research. The US does not permit the clinics to make a profit on the sale of the fetal tissue but does this law extend to indirect profits made by the vaccine companies? If the vaccine companies are making money on the vaccines themselves, they have profited from the abortion albeit indirectly. The above also confirms an ongoing industry and not just a historical tragic wrong that will never be repeated.
I will quote another section of Vallance’s article because it demonstrates that he is either sincerely misguided or deliberately being creative with facts:
Medical research relies heavily on cell cultures—populations of cells originally removed from a living organism and then grown artificially in containers. Under the proper conditions, these cells live and propagate for decades, and are commercially available for scientific use. Regrettably, the original cells in some of these cultures were harvested from abortions performed in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the vaccine developers at Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna did not use abortion-derived cell cultures in producing their COVID-19 vaccines, other companies did. SARS-CoV-2 researchers at both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca used HEK-293, a cell line originally isolated from a baby girl aborted in the Netherlands in 1973.
Vallance, op cit
There are at least two errors here. First, his claim that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines did not use abortion derived cell cultures. If he means that they are not in the end product then he is correct. If he means that Pfizer and Moderna did not use them at all then he is incorrect. Reuters (a “fact checker” which is pro-vax) comments:
Cloned fetal cells (not fetal tissue) are sometimes used in the development, confirmation or production process of making vaccines – including the COVID-19 vaccine (here , here ). As explained by the UK medicine regulator bit.ly/3kmmmdV and in an article published in the journal Nature bit.ly/3kj29pn , the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19 requires so-called HEK (human embryonic kidney) cells to cultivate the modified virus used to make the vaccine. The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, are not made using human cells, but they have been used in vaccine testing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-vaccines-not-os-with-idUSKBN2AO2OY
In reality, Pfizer does have some dependence upon abortion at least in the testing of their products. As we have seen, this is needed on a continual basis and the use of fetal tissue in testing is not likely to be replaced. I anticipate that Dr. Vallance will argue that the cell lines will last a very long time and will not need repeat abortions but that is just dishonesty. As we have seen, Planned Parenthood obtains informed consent from women having abortions which implies that new abortions are regularly needed. In addition, the cell lines will eventually need to be replaced. This practice will continue simply because the government refuse to criminalise abortion, vaccine companies want to maximise profits and churchmen will continue being their customers. To claim (or imply) that the abortions connected with the vaccines are just a historic, tragic wrongs that will never be repeated is false. It is true that we cannot the change past but we can influence the future – but do we want to?
Random Ramblings 