Vaccines and the unborn: The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away

Concerns about the ethicality of vaccines produced using cell lines derived from abortions cannot be dispelled by temporal conjuring or theological sleights-of-hand.

It’s become a truism that Covid is a kind of new, catch-all religion, filling the spaces once occupied by deities, icons and scripture. It provides rituals, rites, sacred writ, sins, punishments, a new set of moral guidelines for societies in spiritual free fall, and also a new priesthood in the form of the ‘health tsars’ who issue ordinances and reprimands in scheduled homilies to the public.  The traditional religions all fell down before it, acquiescing in demands by the new high priesthood that they abandon their flocks and render them up to the new God Covid. 

But this process may have been in train for longer than we have yet understood. An interesting stained window on this possibility is afforded by consideration of what has been happening to Catholic teaching on vaccinations. 

The Catholic Church is not merely the largest Church in the world, but also, beyond a shadow of controversy, the single richest repository of human understanding on issues of ethics and morality in human society, and for that very reason has long been in the crosshairs of ‘progressives’ seeking to obliterate existing moral understandings and replace them with knowing nonsense. There is scarcely a question of moral principle or a dilemma of complexity concerning human thoughts and actions that Catholic teaching has not had the definitive word upon, and these understandings far transcend the domestic affairs of the faith itself, offering universal rules and guidelines that have crept into jurisprudence of innumerable kinds, including understandings of bodily integrity and limits, relations and responsibilities between humans beings, and fundamental rights and freedoms the world over. 

Let us consider, then, what has been occurring in respect of Catholic teaching and the topic of vaccination.  In effect, in the Time of Covid, the Church has not merely bent over and abandoned its own people, but it has actively moved to side with state and health authorities in riding roughshod over human freedoms. Recently, the most incomprehensible pope in living memory has been excoriating those among his flock who have dared to question the erosion of vital human freedoms by the Covid onslaught; ‘exhorting’ Catholics to abide by globalist directives to lock down the world in response to a medium-range influenza; mocking — yes, the pope mocking — those who voice opposition to these unprecedented tyrannies. At the same time, even more ominously, the Church has seemed to turn over its ancient repositories of moral authority to the hucksters of amoral blackmail promoting what is self-evidently a play for the most intimate control over the lives of human beings, and to apparently offer itself up as the centrepiece of a new world church that seeks to, in effect, leave Christianity behind. 

Take the Pontifical Academy For Life, a group established in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to advise the papacy on complex bioethical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and so forth. It need hardly be stressed that these are far and away the most critical areas facing the human species in this time when technological advancement hogs the fast lane, while moral and ethical understandings move forward in the manner of asses and carts rattling along the hard shoulder. 

The topic of vaccination enables us to see with sobering clarity what has been happening. In 2005, the Pontifical Academy for Life carried out a commission on behalf of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) in conducting an examination of the question of ‘tainted’ vaccines — those containing live viruses which have been prepared from human cell lines of foetal origin, using tissues from aborted human foetuses as a source of such cells —  producing a study which was duly approved by the CDF.  The chief purpose of the document, titled ‘Moral reflections about vaccines prepared from cells of aborted human fetuses’, was to determine whether it could ever be morally permissible to avail of a vaccine thus obtained, and to what extent those involved in producing, administering, marketing or using the vaccines could be deemed to have illicitly cooperated with the original wrong of abortion. The academy considered a number of such vaccines, directed at a range of conditions, such as rubella, mumps, measles, smallpox, hepatitis A, rabies, and poliomyelitis. Centrally, the academy addressed this question: By having an involvement with the manufacture, distribution, advertisement or use of such vaccines, would someone be implicated in illicit cooperation with evil, even if this evil was carried out forty years ago?

In a detailed study of the issues, the academy differentiated between ‘formal cooperation’ (where someone actively cooperates in wrongdoing and shares the evil intention of the wrongdoer), and ‘material cooperation’, where this sharing of the evil intention is not present. It also identified aspects of ‘proximate’ and ‘remote’ cooperation, which might serve to mitigate the degree of culpability, and also differentiated between ‘passive and ‘active’ cooperation.

 In its conclusions, the academy allowed from some degree of latitude where no alternatives to abortion-sourced vaccines are available, but in general took the view that the preparation, distribution and marketing of such vaccines are morally illicit activities, because they might encourage the performance of other voluntary abortions, with the purpose of producing of further such vaccines. The document did, however, allow for gradations of moral responsibility. It concluded that ‘doctors or parents who resort to the use of these vaccines for children, in spite of knowing their origin (voluntary abortion), carry out a form of very remote mediate material cooperation, and thus very mild, in the performance of the original act of abortion.’  Those involved in the manufacture and marketing of such vaccines are guilty of greater wrongdoing than those who avail of them. The cooperation is therefore more intense on the part of the authorities and national health systems than of those who consume them, though the degree of culpability depends on the degree of necessity in each case. 

Nevertheless, parents, doctors etc. have a responsibility always to oppose ‘even by making an objection of conscience’ the use of vaccines whose production is connected with procured abortion, since the use of such vaccines ‘contributes in the creation of a generalized social consensus to the operation of the pharmaceutical industries which produce them in an immoral way.’  Such doctors and parents had ‘a moral duty to continue to fight and to employ every lawful means in order to make life difficult for the pharmaceutical industries which act unscrupulously and unethically.’ They also have a responsibility to ‘take recourse to alternative vaccines (if they exist), putting pressure on the political authorities and health systems so that other vaccines without moral problems become available.’ 

The academy stressed that the burden of this important battle cannot and must not fall on innocent children and on the health situation of the population  — especially pregnant women. If no ethically untainted vaccine is available, doctors and parents should refrain from using abortion-sourced vaccines unless this was likely to cause significant risks to the health of children or the general population, in which cases, ‘vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis.’ 

The academy emphasised that this qualified sanctioning of the use of tainted vaccines should not be misinterpreted as a declaration of the lawfulness of their production, marketing and use, but ‘to be understood as being a passive material cooperation and, in its mildest and remotest sense . . .  morally justified as an extrema ratio due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children.’ It was in particular stressed that such cooperation ‘occurs in a context of moral coercion of the conscience of parents, who are forced to choose to act against their conscience or otherwise, to put the health of their children and of the population as a whole at risk. This is an unjust alternative choice, which must be eliminated as soon as possible.’

This is crystal clear, and also a manifestly pained effort to achieve the best compromise between competing moral imperatives. The deliberation reads as rational and compassionate, seeming to deal with the questions various actors in such matters might have.  

In October 2016, Pope Francis summarily dismissed the academy’s 172 members, including some members he had appointed himself. Some of these latter were restored in 2017, however, when he appointed a board comprising entirely his own selections, including a number of highly controversial figures. In dismissing the existing academy, Pope Francis approved new statutes for the body, which took effect on January 1st 2017, and inter alia ceased the practice whereby academy members had been required to take an oath to defend life in accordance with Church teaching. In future, members would be selected ‘without any religious discrimination’ and would serve for five years instead of for life. 

In June 2017, Pope Francis appointed 45 members, including some previous members, a minority of whom were Catholic clerics. Among several controversial appointments was Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest, philosopher and moral theologian based in Oxford University, on record as supporting abortions up to and including 18 weeks gestation. In 2011, Biggar stated that it is ‘not clear that a human foetus is the same kind of thing as an adult or a mature human being, and therefore deserves quite the same treatment.’

One of the first interventions by the new academy was on vaccines, introduced with the proposal that the academy’s 2005 deliberation on that subject needed to be ‘updated in the light of medical advances and current conditions of vaccine preparation’, with special reference to vaccines produced using cells derived from aborted foetuses.  This resulted in the publication of ‘Note on the Italian vaccine issue’, on July 31st 2017. 

A particular factor identified in this revision was ‘the fact that the cell lines in use then — and now — are ‘very distant from the original abortions and no longer imply that bond of moral cooperation indispensable for an ethically negative evaluation of their use.’  The 2017 document also stressed the ‘moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others . . . especially the safety [of] more vulnerable subjects such as pregnant women and those affected by immunodeficiency who cannot be vaccinated against these diseases.’ It emphasised, too, that the moral wrong arising from vaccines involving the use of cells from voluntarily aborted foetuses lies ‘in the actions, not in the vaccines or the material itself.’  

Where the deliberation differed most radically from its 2005 precursor was in the conclusion offered that there is no ‘morally relevant cooperation’ between the use of the vaccines most commonly used in childhood and the practice of voluntary abortion, notwithstanding that most of these involve the past use of cell lines obtained through abortion. ‘Hence, we believe that all clinically recommended vaccinations can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion.’ You might say that the moral imperative governing the 2005 deliberation was essentially inverted: ‘While the commitment to ensuring that every vaccine has no connection in its preparation to any material of [sic] originating from an abortion, the moral responsibility to vaccinate is reiterated in order to avoid serious health risks for children and the general population.’

In reaching this conclusion, the new, Pope Francis-appointed academy noted that ‘today it is no longer necessary to obtain cells from new voluntary abortions, and that the cell lines on which the vaccines are based in are derived solely from two fetuses originally aborted in the 1960s.’ From here it made the following considerable leap:

‘. . . the cell lines currently used are very distant from the original abortions and no longer imply that bond of moral cooperation indispensable for an ethically negative evaluation of their use.’

This conclusion has resulted in the adoption of a new concept of ‘moral distance’ between the  — admitted — original evil of abortion and the act of cooperating with the promulgation and use of vaccines thus developed. This reasoning is now visible in virtually every public analysis of the matter, including a recent statement of the Iona Institute.

This 2017 line is now emanating directly from bishops’ conferences all over the world. On December 3rd 2020 the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales issued a follow-up to an earlier statement on the same topic of vaccinations issued in September, in which they used findings of the CDF and the Pontifical Academy to suggest that there were no longer any reasons for misgivings about such vaccines.

The key passage is:

‘At present, debate concerns the use of the vaccines developed by Pfizer & BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. Some have questioned the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine since it has been developed from cell-lines originating from the cells of an aborted foetus in 1983. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Academy of Life have expressed the view that one may in good conscience and for a grave reason receive a vaccine sourced in this way, provided that there is a sufficient moral distance [my italics, JW] between the present administration of the vaccine and the original wrongful action. In the COVID-19 pandemic, we judge that this grave reason exists and that one does not sin by receiving the vaccine.’

The CDF finding cited was a 2008 document, Dignitas Personae.

The phrase 'moral distance' does not appear in this document. Most of the exploration in the relevant section relates to researchers who might become embroiled in illicit experimentation. But the issue of vaccines is referred to near the end of paragraph 35, which deals with differing degrees of responsibility in the general context of abortion-obtained cell lines:

‘Grave reasons may be morally proportionate to justify the use of such “biological material”. Thus, for example, danger to the health of children could permit parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin, while keeping in mind that everyone has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available. Moreover, in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision.’

This summary reflects the 2005 deliberation of the Pontifical Academy for Life, especially in emphasising the necessity for Catholics to speak out about illicit vaccines, even when they have no option but to use them. What it directly addresses is the question of 'danger to the health of children' necessitating vaccines which 'could permit’ parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin (the use of the word 'could' makes clear that this is a mere hypothesis). Then it goes on to refer to mechanisms by which the parents might relieve their guilt or in part discharge their responsibility, which again follows the same path as the Pontifical Academy in emphasising an obligation on parents to speak out against such vaccines.  It is clear that the CDF’s intention here is to address the moral dilemma of a parent whose child is in serious danger unless he gets the vaccine — the only one available and containing illicit materials — and is directed at extending some kind of exculpation in that context. In any event, the section is sufficiently hedged around with caveats and conditions that it is clearly not intended to be used as a general principle regarding the acceptability of such vaccines. Apart from not referring to ‘moral distance’, the analysis proffered might be deemed in the way of an obiter dictum rather than an actual ruling. It certainly does not appear that what is hypothesised is remotely suggestive of the proposition that an industrialised vaccine production based on illicit biological material, however much time has elapsed since the biological material was obtained, could be regarded in the same way as a health emergency relating to an individual child. The surrounding material makes it clear that there is a duty to oppose the use of illicit material, which implies opposing the manufacture and use of the vaccines. It is clear from the logic applied that, in practical — as opposed to philosophical — terms, the central argument for not promulgating or accepting vaccines founded on illicit materials is that to support them in any way is tantamount to providing the abortion industry with the appearance of virtue. 

It is therefore difficult to see how the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales could legitimately cite this source in support of its concept of a ‘moral distance’ between the development and use of tainted vaccines. 

Moreover, since it is established that Covid-19 represents virtually a zero risk to children, there is no earthly justification for adducing this hypothesis in the context being addressed by the bishops. Even if you expand the word ‘child’ to imply any human person in danger of ill health or even death, the succour provided in the CDF document for the argument the bishops are advancing is flimsy indeed, since the context for the CDF hypothesis suggests an urgent and singular emergency, rather than a mass vaccination programme. 

It is interesting that the eminent and holy English and Welsh bishops felt it necessary to beef up the findings of the 2017 Pontifical Academy for Life deliberation in this manner.  The ‘moral distance’ concept is clearly gleaned from this latter source and, combined with a broad brushstroke drawing-in of the Covid narrative, used to elide any implication of residual wrongdoing arising from ‘the original wrongful action’, which is not the conclusion of either the CDF in 2008 or the Pontifical Academy in 2005.  If we examine the logic of the original Pontifical Academy deliberation and the findings of the CDF in Dignitas Personae, it is clear that the uppermost factors in their reasoning are, on the one hand, defending the unborn child, and on the other weighing the degree of urgency pertaining to the need for a particular vaccine. It is also clear that the degree of urgency being inferred by the bishops of England and Wales in the context of Covid is based on political and media hype rather than on objective facts or circumstances. [This is a point requiring much more elaboration than I have space for here; I hope to deal with it in one or two hopefully definitive articles on the true basis of the Covid ‘pandemic’, to be published here this side of Christmas.] 

In November, the US Congress of Catholic Bishops issued a statement that followed the same essential lines of logic as the British counterparts. Such was the inclination of the bishops’ statement that media headlines were able to  claim that the US bishops had declared that it was ‘not immoral’ to be vaccinated by Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer Inc. and Moderna. ‘Neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine involved the use of cell lines that originated in fetal tissue taken from the body of an aborted baby at any level of design, development or production,’ the bishops had declared . ‘They are not completely free from any connection to abortion, however, as both Pfizer and Moderna made use of a tainted cell line for one of the confirmatory lab tests of their products. There is thus a connection, but it is relatively remote. Some are asserting that if a vaccine is connected in any way with tainted cell lines, then it is immoral to be vaccinated with them. This is an inaccurate portrayal of Catholic moral teaching.’

The use of the word ‘inaccurate’ here may itself be inaccurate. It would be more correct to say that such an assertion might amount to an over-simplification of the Catholic position, but, as outlined above, it would not be fundamentally wrong. Indeed, it would be more correct than the position intimated by the US bishops, which is that ‘tainted’ vaccines are no longer a problem. 

It seems to me that what is afoot here, beginning with the shift in position initiated by the new Pontifical Academy in 2017, is a move to flip the very basis of the Church’s position from a default opposition to such vaccines (amenable to being relaxed on grounds of urgency) to a position whereby these become acceptable by reason of temporal distance from the original wrong. The reasoning of the most recent Pontifical Academy declaration, and consequently of both sets of bishops here, is a workshop in relativism: the claimed benefits of vaccines outweigh moral scruples concerning their origin; the passage of time can be invoked to create moral distance; and — implicitly — the necessity for vaccine coverage is on the same moral plane as being anti-abortion —  this being the import of the Pontifical Academy’s assertion of 2017 that ‘the moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others is no less urgent [than defending unborn life], especially the safety [of] more vulnerable subjects such as pregnant women and those affected by immunodeficiency who cannot be vaccinated against these diseases.' This is the kind of argument abortionists use to win over confused Catholics: ends justify means. 

Were such reasoning to be applied across the range of Church teaching on ethics and morality, it would have the effect of unravelling everything in its path. Take this sentence, also from the Pontifical Academy’s 2017 document: 'As for the question of the vaccines that used or may have used cells coming from voluntarily aborted fetuses in their preparation, it must be specified that the “wrong” in the moral sense lies in the actions, not in the vaccines or the material itself.’ Could this logic not be used to justify the consumption of grilled human-burgers on the basis that my neighbour had despatched his victim without my complicity, I was very, very hungry, and the whole thing happened quite a while ago?

This essentially pro-vaccination-in-all-circumstances thinking is already penetrating deep into the theological and theosophical culture. Even commentators who place the defence of human life at the top of their priorities tend to equivocate when confronted by the assertion that a particular vaccine is the silver bullet to end human sickness. In a recent essay ‘Moral Guidance on Using COVID-19 Vaccines Developed with Human Fetal Cell Lines’, in Public Discourse, The Journal of the Witherspoon Institution, Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P stated: 

‘Persons of conscience should be free to refuse vaccination against COVID-19 even if they live in a society with community spread of that disease. However, their communities should also be free to protect the common good by not permitting them to enter schools, restaurants, malls, airports, and other public spaces where they may unwittingly catch or spread the disease.’

The striking thing about this observation is its gratuitousness in the middle of an otherwise useful and unequivocal paper. Otherwise, Fr. Austriaco declared that taking a tainted vaccine would be morally justifiable only if its use did not contribute to future evil acts and if its use was occasioned by a grave proportionate reason. Yet, here, he undid his own wisdom by appearing to nod to the prevailing culture of viral hysteria, which implies that Covid is the new Black Death. It is also the case that his uncalled for observation — in the context of the issue being considered — was in harmony with papal pronouncements on both Covid and vaccination, in which the pope has appeared to support political authorities imposing draconian restrictions on personal freedoms, over the calls of many citizens for more proportionate measures. 

In Fr Austriaco’s observation quoted above, there appears to be a contradiction between his two uses of the word ‘free’. The point of the first is to recognise and defend the right to act in accordance with conscience on a matter of the most fundamental morality. The second use of the word appears to imply that the ‘community’ — by which he appears to mean a political authority, most likely governing by decree — has a legitimate entitlement (a ‘freedom’) to deny that first freedom by imposing a form of coercion, viz. the withdrawal from the person seeking the first kind of freedom certain fundamental rights and freedoms: education, food, travel and access to innumerable goods, including many necessities. This means that a freedom extended with the velvet-gloved hand of philosophy is liable to be (legitimately?) withdrawn by the iron fist of state coercion, which is an odd interpretation of the word ‘freedom’. 

The point of freedom-of-conscience is surely that it leaves open the question of the objective legitimacy of the position advocated by the conscience of the relevant person. He may be right; she may be wrong; but either or both have the right to be wrong, because even the chance that they are right and allowed to persist in the positions they have taken stands as a guarantor to society that the principles they fight for have a chance of one day being restored, to the betterment of society, i.e. the ‘common good’. If such actors are driven by coercion in the opposite direction to that which their consciences decree, this surely negates the extension of ‘freedom-of-conscience’ purportedly — but in fact spuriously — extended in the first place. 

There are lots of further complications here, of course: for example — again — whether the gravity of Covid, or indeed almost any disease short of the Black Plague, is really more urgent than the principle of defending life in the womb. Fr Austriaco’s position, as above, implicitly, is that it is, to the extent that he suggests that the society has a higher entitlement to protect itself against Covid than the individual should be permitted in defending the unborn child. The community is permitted to sanction the person of conscience, but the person of conscience may only passively protest against the wrong being perpetrated with the implicit permission of the community. This is an all but total inversion of the principles set down in 2005 by the Pontifical Academy for Life,  and raises the question of whether the deterrence against defending the unborn child represented by the extension to the community of the ‘right’ to punish the person who defends such a  child will not ultimately render meaningless the extension of freedom-of-conscience. What is extended with one hand is withdrawn with the other. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.