- US Catholic bishops issued a statement urging people to avoid the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
- The virus developed using human fetal tissue replicated from aborted stem cells.
- Pope Francis said earlier that taking vaccines derived from aborted cells would be “morally acceptable”.
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The United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference advised people to avoid getting the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine because it was developed with cells from an aborted fetus.
“The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines raised concerns that an abortion-derived cell line was used to test them, but not in their production,” said a conference statement.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, was “developed, tested and produced with abortion-derived cell lines, raising additional moral concerns.”
Instead, the conference suggests that, when possible, people should get the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, although both companies used stem cells from aborted fetuses during the testing phase of their vaccine research.
The statement follows an earlier announcement from the Archdiocese of New Orleans on Friday that said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was “morally compromised, as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in the development and production of the vaccine, as well as in testing”.
Insider contacted Johnson & Johnson for comment.
Pope Francis has not yet specifically addressed the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but the Vatican said earlier that it was “morally acceptable” to get vaccines “that used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process”.
In a statement released last December, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offices said that while encouraging pharmaceutical researchers to create vaccines without employing the use of fetuses, it also warned that Catholics would not violate Church beliefs if they used vaccines created using aborted cells.
“The certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in the production of the vaccines are derived,” said the statement, noting that the use of vaccines “should not in itself constitute legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion, and necessarily presupposes the opposition to this practice on the part of those who use these vaccines ”.
The cells used in the development of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are derived from an aborted fetus in the early 1970s and have been replicated numerous times in several scientific firms and pharmaceutical companies.
The debate over the use of fetal stem cells has been going on for several decades, with anti-abortion advocates arguing that supporting companies doing this research amounts to tacit approval of abortion.
The US government regularly funds research using fetal tissue. In 2014, for example, the National Institutes of Health distributed about $ 76 million in support of projects that use fetal cells, according to Scientific American.
Former President Donald Trump restricted the use of aborted fetal tissue in research during his tenure, although Regeneron, the antibody therapy he called a “cure” for COVID-19, has been tested with fetal cells. The scientific community released a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to reverse Trump’s restrictions to allow increased use of fetal tissue.
“We are confident that an independent and rigorous assessment of the scientific and ethical merits of HFT [human fetal tissue] the research will find that it will continue to promote scientific research and contribute to the development of new treatments, “said the letter.