Page 10 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

procedures designed to cure, treat, prevent and protect
people against real threats to their health and even to their
survival. The urgent need to find suitable vaccines in the
current pandemic may account for some of the confusion
and the complications which have occurred; perhaps the
speed entailed by the urgency has led some of the usual
stages in clinical trials to have been rushed or superseded
in some cases, to greater difficulties in identifying those
categories of people for whom a given vaccine is inappro-
priate, due to other underlying conditions, age, and so
forth. All of this is part of verifying whether a given
vaccines is safe and effective or not.
The moral issues at stake here cannot be reduced to
questions of safety and efficacy, nor even to matters of
equitable distribution and access to vaccines once they are
approved. Nor can the principles of the social doctrine of
the Church be invoked as if all could be reduced to them,
important as they are as key criteria of justice in this, as in
other spheres of life. One of the key moral issues at stake
is that of how the vaccines, or some of them, have been
produced and/or tested in this whole process, in particular
whether a vaccine has been developed from the cells of
tissues taken from deliberately aborted human foetuses
and/or whether biological material derived from such
deliberately aborted human foetuses has been used in the
testing of a vaccine initially developed from another
source. Bland reassurances from government officials,
often vague, if not directly evasive, cannot suffice to satisfy
the legitimate and often pressing demands of conscience
manifested by widespread sectors of the lay faithful, as
well as by many clergy, including many prominent
bishops, on what appears to be a cooperation with directly
procured abortion and a matter of active scandal, which

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