Catholic bishops encourage faithful to choose vaccine carefully

CATHOLIC bishops in the USA have advised followers not to get one of the anti-covid vaccines as they say it uses cells from aborted foetuses.

In a statement the Conference of Catholic Bishops said that it believes that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine poses a dilemma because of the way it is produced, using cells from aborted foetuses and recommend that faithful not have it as their first choice.

“The approval of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in the United States again raises questions about the moral permissibility of using vaccines developed, tested, and / or produced with the help of abortion-derived cell lines,” they said in a statement to the US press.

The bishops differentiate between the J&J vaccine and those of Pfizer and Moderna in which an abortion-derived cell line was used to test them, but not in their production.

“So if you can choose a vaccine, you should choose the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines over those from Johnson & Johnson,” they said, which is “the one that is least related to abortion.”

However, they added in their statement that “when ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted foetuses in their research and production process.”

“While we must continue to insist that pharmaceutical companies stop using abortion-derived cell lines, given the global suffering that this pandemic is causing, we reaffirm that getting vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good,” they added.

None of the vaccines actually contain foetal tissue. Foetal cell lines are cells grown in a laboratory, which are descended from cells taken from foetal tissue from voluntary abortions in the 1970s and 1980s.

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