Common good vs. edge of evil?

As the COVID-19 pandemic approached its second year of disrupting life as we knew it, the first two of the long-awaited vaccines against the coronavirus — by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — received “emergency use authorization” from the FDA in December, and a methodical rollout of vaccine administration began. Several other vaccines were already in development, testing, or awaiting similar authorization as 2021 began.

Yet long before the first health-care workers and emergency responders began rolling up their sleeves, Catholic bishops and ethicists were already voicing concerns and explaining the moral considerations involving vaccines that are developed, manufactured, or tested using cell lines that originated with a fetus that had been aborted. 

To develop vaccines, scientists take samples of a live virus, grow the virus in living cells, and then alter the virus to produce a weakened form for immunization. Sometimes for this purpose they use cell lines derived from fetal tissue harvested from particular abortions performed decades ago – cell lines that are valued because they have been widely studied and are known to be safe.

So, what’s the moral issue? Despite the good that such a vaccine might accomplish, it has a link, however remote, to the evil act of abortion.

According to a December 2020 statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to participate in the development or use of these vaccines constitutes “cooperation with evil” to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon how direct, proximate, intentional, and active an individual’s participation is. Obviously, those who procured the original fetal tissue from abortion and the pharmaceutical firms that knowingly conduct research with these cell lines bear the greatest responsibility. Those of us who consent to receiving such a vaccine, on the other hand, cooperate in the evil to a very minute degree – what theologians might term “passive remote material cooperation.”

Nevertheless, the CDF said, when “ethically irreproachable” vaccines are unavailable to combat this pandemic, “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.”

While it is best to avoid any cooperation in evil whatsoever, the moral choice of whether to receive the COVID-19 vaccines remains a matter for the informed individual conscience, considering also the benefit to oneself and to the common good as well as the particular vaccine being offered.

The Bishops speak

As word of vaccine links to the problematic cell lines became known last year, individual U.S. bishops began to voice objections. Among the most vocal was Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas. “If a vaccine for this virus is only attainable if we use body parts of aborted children, then I will refuse the vaccine,” he tweeted last April. In November, relying on information provided by the pro-life organization Children of God for Life, he tweeted that the Moderna vaccine in particular “is not morally produced” and urged the faithful to reject it.

In a November memo to the bishops of the United States, two leading members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops responded to such advice. Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, IN, who chairs the doctrine committee, and Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, KS, chairman of the committee for pro-life activities, wrote that it is “an inaccurate portrayal of Church teaching” to assert that “if a vaccine is connected in any way with tainted cell lines, then it is immoral to be vaccinated” with it.

“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 two bishops wrote, citing a report by the prolife Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Although both companies used a tainted cell line for confirmatory tests on their vaccines, the connection to fetal tissue “is relatively remote,” they concluded.

A few days later, Bishop Rhoades and Archbishop Naumann released a more detailed statement, Moral Considerations Regarding the New COVID-19 Vaccines.

“In view of the gravity of the current pandemic and the lack of availability of alternative vaccines, the reasons to accept the new COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are sufficiently serious to justify their use, despite their remote connection to morally compromised cell lines,” Bishop Rhoades and Archbishop Naumann said in a fuller public statement a few weeks later. They went on to say that receiving the COVID-19 vaccine “should be considered an act of love of our neighbor and part of our moral responsibility for the common good.”

The AstraZeneca vaccine, which at the time was awaiting FDA emergency use approval, is “more morally compromised” for having been produced using an aborted fetal cell line, they said, and therefore “should be avoided if there are alternatives available.”

Meanwhile, Bishop Strickland joined four other bishops of the world, including Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, in appearing to take issue with this position. “Catholics categorically cannot encourage and promote the sin of abortion, even in the slightest, by accepting these vaccines,” they said in a statement.

After the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine received FDA emergency-use authorization in late February, Bishop Rhoades and Archbishop Naumann issued a further statement clarifying that the newly available vaccine was more problematic than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines because it used aborted fetal cell lines not only in testing, but in development and production as well.

“[I]f one can choose among equally safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the vaccine with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines should be chosen,” they said, echoing the CDF position. “Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson’s.”

When bishops take issue with other bishops and even with the Vatican itself on the issue of the COVID-19 vaccines, what’s a Catholic to do?

Prudential judgement

In the end, no Church authority can oblige individual Catholics what to do about the COVID-19 vaccines – which vaccine to accept, or even whether to get vaccinated at all. That is the view of Janet E. Smith, a retired professor of moral theology.

“I don’t disagree with the conclusion of the CDF that COVID-19 vaccines can be used for suitably serious reasons, but I want people to understand that it is not the task of the Church to decide what those suitably serious reasons are or when they exist,” she wrote in a Crisis magazine commentary. “These are prudential decisions to be made by individual moral agents – not by any curial office.

“The Church can only give ‘guidance,’” Smith said. While she and other moral theologians believe traditional principles of “cooperation with evil” correctly apply only to actions in which an individual’s “contribution” is made before or simultaneous to the actions performed – and therefore are not applicable to questions of accepting a vaccine with links to an abortion committed more than 40 years ago – Smith does state that abortion-tainted vaccines are problematic to receive insofar as they involve “appropriation” or “benefiting from ill-gotten gains.”

“When we can avoid such action, we should,” she wrote in the National Catholic Register, “but at times it is moral to benefit from past evil action.”

GERALD KORSON, editorial consultant for Legatus magazine, is based in Indiana.

 

Cheat sheet on COVID vaccines

In its 2005 Moral Reflection on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Fetuses, the Pontifical Academy for Life said that when offered vaccines tainted even remotely by the use of cell lines from aborted fetuses, doctors and families “have a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines” if such are available “and to make a conscientious objection with regard to those which have moral problems.”

So how does one concerned about this moral issue object to the problematic COVID-19 vaccines? These are the primary options.

Ask questions, explore options. Some vaccines have stronger ties to abortion than others because they used cell lines from an aborted fetus in the development or manufacture of their vaccines. These include Johnson & Johnson-Janssen Biotech, which received emergency-use authorization from the FDA in late February; Oxford-AstraZeneca, which anticipates getting the green light in April; and Novavax, on track for June distribution.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the first to receive emergency use authorization in the U.S., used such cell lines only in testing their products and so are further removed from the act of abortion.

Sanofi Pasteur hopes to have two vaccines ready by the end of 2021. One of these, developed in conjunction with GlaxoSmithKline, appears to be free of any link to cell lines from aborted fetuses; the other, produced in a partnership with Translate Bio, used aborted fetal cell line in its testing. Several other companies are also in the process of developing or testing COVID-19 vaccines.

It’s worth finding out out which vaccines are available in your area and choosing the least offensive vaccine.

No option? If you are at elevated risk of COVID-19 or simply wish to get the vaccine to help prevent its spread, and only one vaccine is available to you, feel free to roll up your sleeve. The greater good of protecting yourself and others may far outweigh any concern over remote cooperation or appropriation of evil involved.

Just wait. That’s the advice Bishop Joseph Strickland at one point offered his faithful in the diocese of Tyler, Texas: if you can prudently delay vaccination, hold out until a COVID-19 vaccine with no ties to abortion whatsoever becomes available.

Skip the needle. The Catholic Church presents a strong moral argument in favor of getting vaccinated against serious communicable disease, but does not demand it. Vaccination “is not, as a rule, a moral obligation” and “must be voluntary,” writes the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its December 2020 Note on the Morality of Using Some Anti-COVID-19 Vaccines. From the ethical standpoint, it went on, “the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good.”

Nevertheless, those who refuse vaccines “for reasons of conscience” must “do their utmost” to avoid infecting others by appropriate behavior and preventative measures, said the CDF.

All the faithful can further register their objections to vaccines that use aborted fetal cell lines to political leaders, pharmaceutical companies, health officials, and the various media.