Corona Daily 165: The Foetal Issue

Yesterday, the US conference of Catholic Bishops asked Catholics to avoid the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The vaccine was termed morally corrupt, because it uses cells derived decades ago from an abortion.

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The Vatican and Pope Francis have been more practical. Considering the severity of the pandemic, and the remote connection with abortion, Vatican declared it was morally acceptable to take vaccines for the greater good. This didn’t make abortion any less evil, it added. Pope Francis took two Pfizer shots. All five thousand Vatican employees are asked to be vaccinated. Those who don’t are threatened with the loss of their jobs.

When Vatican issued the statement, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was not yet in the picture. Pfizer and Moderna use different technologies.

What exactly is the issue with foetal tissue?

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Way back in the 1960s Dr Leonard Hayflick, an American scientist, first used cells derived from foetal tissues in clinical research. The cells were created from an aborted four-month gestation foetus. That cell line was successfully used to create a plethora of vaccines against rubella, rabies, polio, measles, chickenpox. Human foetal tissue has also been used to study HIV/AIDS, birth defects, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and many other diseases.

Most of the Covid-19 vaccines use only two foetal tissues, both created in the labs of the Netherlands. One (HEK-293) is a kidney cell line derived from a foetus aborted in 1972. The other (PER.C6) is the one used in the J&J vaccine. That was created from the eye cells of an 18-week foetus aborted in 1985. Just two foetuses, one from 1972 and another from 1985. Both abortions were voluntary, requested by the parents.

It is important to note those foetal tissues are not used in the vaccines, but foetal cell lines. Foetal cell lines are grown in a laboratory. They descend from the 1972 and 1985 cells. But over the last forty or fifty years, the current foetal cell lines are thousands of generations removed from the original tissues. They hardly contain any tissue from a foetus. This is what Vatican probably meant when it talked of the vaccines’ ‘remoteness’ from aborted foetuses.

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Vaccines such as the J&J vaccine use altered adenovirus, which cannot replicate by itself. The foetal-derived cell line provides the replication machinery that allows generating vast amounts of the virus. Animal cells are not as effective in generating a robust and specific immune response as human cells.  Pfizer and Moderna did perform confirmation tests using foetal cell lines. The J&J vaccine used the foetal cell lines in production as well. That makes it morally corrupt.

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In 2019, the Trump administration banned use of foetal tissue from abortions in research. But the policy allowed use of decades old foetal cell lines. That is why we have covid vaccines today. Trump himself was treated with a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that he described as “cure”. That and Remdesivir, the drug given to him, were both developed using cells from aborted foetuses. Republicans talk of the sanctity of human life and promoting guns in the same breath. Trump, in his last days as a president, obsessively carried out three executions, despite knowing his successor planned to abolish the federal death sentence.

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The case of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist in Ireland, is well known. She died unnecessarily, begging for an abortion. Catholic Irish laws didn’t allow abortions. She and the unborn baby both died.

The catholic priest sex abuse report mentions several instances of the priests asking the nuns they have impregnated to go for quick abortions.

The final decision to abort must belong to the pregnant woman, not to an organization that allows only men in their hierarchy.

Ravi