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- American Catholic Bishops are asking people to seek out vaccines other than Johnson & Johnson’s if possible.
- J & J’s COVID-19 vaccine was developed using human fetal tissue replicated from aborted stem cells.
- Pope Francis has previously said vaccines derived from aborted cells may be “morally acceptable”.
- Visit the Insider home page for more stories.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has spoken out against the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine because it was developed from cells from an aborted fetus.
“The vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have raised concerns because an abortion-derived cell line was used to test them, but not for their production,” a conference statement said.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, has been “developed, tested and produced with cell lines derived from abortion, which raises additional moral concerns,” he continued.
The conference said that if there was a choice, people should take Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines instead, referring to its January recommendations that people opt for a vaccine with “the least bloodline connection. cellular derived from abortion “.
If a person does not have a choice of vaccine, however, the conference said in this January guide that it was morally acceptable to accept any available vaccine against the coronavirus “given that the COVID-19 virus may involve serious health risks “.
The new statement follows an announcement by the Archdiocese of New Orleans on Friday that described the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as “morally compromised because it uses the abortion-derived cell line in the development and production of the vaccine. as well as the tests “.
Insider has reached out to Johnson & Johnson for comment.
The Food and Drug Administration cleared the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over the weekend for emergency use. As the first single-dose coronavirus vaccine to be cleared in the United States, it could help Americans achieve herd immunity – the level of resistance to COVID-19 needed to stop the coronavirus from spreading – more quickly .
Pope Francis has yet to specifically address the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but the Vatican has previously said it might be “morally acceptable” to take vaccines “that used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research process. and production “.
In a statement released in December, the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said while encouraging pharmaceutical researchers to create vaccines without resorting to the use of fetuses, they also indicated that Catholics would not violate Church beliefs if they used vaccines. created using abandoned cells.
“The certainty that the use of these vaccines does not constitute a formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in the production of the vaccines are derived,” the statement said, noting that the use of the vaccines should “not in itself constitute a legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion, and necessarily supposes opposition to this practice by those who use these vaccines. “
The cells used in the development of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine originate from an aborted fetus in the early 1970s and have been reproduced many times in various scientific and pharmaceutical companies.
The debate over the use of fetal stem cells has raged for decades, with anti-abortion advocates arguing that supporting companies that do such research amounts to tacit endorsement of abortion.
The US government regularly funds research using fetal tissue. In 2014, for example, the National Institutes of Health donated around $ 76 million to support projects using fetal cells, according to Scientific American.
President Donald Trump restricted the use of aborted fetal tissue in research during his tenure even though Regeneron, the antibody therapy he touted as a “cure” for COVID-19, has been tested using fetal cells. The scientific community has issued a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to reverse Trump’s restrictions to allow increased use of fetal tissue.
“We are convinced that an independent and rigorous assessment of the scientific and ethical merits of HFT [human fetal tissue] the research would find that it will continue to advance scientific research and contribute to the development of new treatments, ”the letter said.
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