THIS subject can be touchy for many because of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, it must be brought out into the public so that Filipinos will be aware.
We are supposed to place our hopes on an anti-Covid-19 vaccine. However, every Filipino must know that some vaccines, including the Covid-19 vaccine, are being developed using aborted fetal cells as a culture medium wherein the target virus, such as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, is grown.
Abortion clinics in countries that legalize abortion procedures collect the remains of the killed (aborted) fetuses and deliver them to laboratories as sold products where they are being used to develop aborted fetal cell lines (in research reports, the word “aborted” is often excluded). These are used in developing products from vaccines to processed food, not to mention, their use in the so-called “stem cell therapy” (those human stem cells used can only be sourced from aborted fetuses and unused embryos or fertilized eggs in test tube conception clinics).
The development of a Covid-19 vaccine also involved two cell lines from aborted fetuses: the HEK-293 kidney cell line, which was generated from aborted babies in 1973, and the PER C6 retinal cell line, which was generated from aborted 18-week-old babies in 1985.
Matt Hadro of the Catholic News Agency reported that the HEK-293 cell line is being used by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which are currently developing their respective Covid-19 vaccines. Other such vaccines include those developed by Johnson & Johnson and Janssen, Susan Anthony of the Charlotte Lozier Institute reported.
However, other Covid-19 vaccines do not use these aborted fetal cell lines, which include those from Inovio, Sanofi/Translate Bio, Pfizer/BioNTech, Novavax and Merck/IAVI as “ethically uncontroversial,” Anthony reported. Moderna, for instance, has developed and is using a “Spike protein” with genetic sequence acquired from published studies on the HEK-293 fetal cell line without using that cell line.
We cannot discuss the Christian ethical issues involved in this matter. (Email me if you want reference to websites that do). However, these issues had been dealt with in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Dignitatis Personae (Dignity of the Person), published in 2008.
The point I am driving at right now is not that vaccination for Covid-19 is wrong. Instead, Filipinos, especially Catholics who have a specific stance against the use of aborted fetuses in medical and food products, must be discerning before getting themselves or their family vaccinated. Make sure that the Covid-19 vaccine being offered to you was not developed using cells from aborted fetuses in abortion clinics around the world. The evil connected with these products will not be worth it.