The Vatican has today described coronavirus vaccines as “morally acceptable” even though they have “used aborted fetal cell lines,” a controversial theory that has recently been rejected in part by science.
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The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a note today, approved by Pope Francis, in which it takes a position on the debate on whether the various vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been developed using cell lines. of abortions.
In this sense, he points out that when “ethically irreproachable” vaccines are not available, it is “morally acceptable” to use vaccines againsta Covid-19 who have used aborted cell lines and fetuses in their research and production process. ”
The reason for this position of the Congregation, led by the Spanish Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, is that it is “remote” cooperation between those who use vaccines and the “evil” of abortion from which these cells come. .
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In addition the moral duty to avoid such passive cooperation “is not binding” if there is a serious danger “such as the spread, otherwise uncontrollable, of a serious pathogen, in this case the pandemic spread” of the coronavirus that creates covid-19.
The Vatican, which already ruled on the issue in 2005, stressed in any case that this position “cannot in itself constitute a legitimation, not even an indirect one, of the practice of abortion.”
And similarly he concluded that the use of these vaccines “does not imply or should in any way imply moral approval the use of cell lines from aborted fetuses.” He called on pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations to “produce, approve, distribute and offer vaccines. ethically acceptable that they do not create problems of conscience, neither to the sanitary personnel nor to the own vaccinated ones “.
The Vatican acknowledges that this issue “is often at the center of insistent debates in public opinion” and some anti-abortion sectors, bishops, experts and Catholic associations have been raising “doubts” about the morality of these remedies.
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In Spain, for example, the Cardinal and Archbishop of Valencia, Antonio Cañizares, said last June that “the devil exists in the midst of a pandemic, trying to conduct research for vaccines,” and that one of them “is made from aborted fetal cells “.
In recent times, social networks have been filled with messages of this type, warning of the presence of tissues from a human fetus among the components of AstraZeneca’s preparation against COVID-19, although the Holy See it does not specifically refer to a company.
A vaccine jar from Pfizer BioNTech./EFE laboratories
However, vaccines are not made from aborted fetal tissues but in some cases use cells created in the laboratory with a remote human origin, that of two aborted fetuses in the 1960s.
Vaccine experts deny that these medicines they carry human fetal tissues extracted from an abortion and require that cell-obtained cell cultures be used the human origin is found in the 1960s in Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In the specific case of the AstraZeneca vaccine against covid-19, chimpanzee adenovirus has been used that has been tested on human cell lines, which are not part of the ingredients.
Scientists who make vaccines do not work with original genetic material but use cell lines created through cultures, copies, and developments of cells extracted from human tissues long after they are obtained.
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The Vaccine Advisory Committee (CAV) of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) has categorically denied the use of abortion cells for antigen preparations, in its article “Vaccines, fetal cells aborted and other irrational theories ”of June 18.
It ‘s not the first time the Vatican defends this type of vaccine but its Pontifical Academy for Life defended “the legality of using” these means if there is no alternative, in a 2005 text entitled “Moral reflections on vaccines prepared from cell Cells from aborted human fetuses “.
EFE