Page 64 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

with immediate pastoral dilemmas and even decisions for
themselves and for the children, which could be matters
of life and death. Making use of a preventative medicine
which in itself is not lethal (mortifera), but which is healing
(sanativa or salutifera), under the conditions explained for
avoiding scandal and for the proportionately grave reason
of seeking to protect their own and others’ lives, they do
no wrong. St. Thomas, too, in another context, gives this
kind of explanation. The one who acts is not doing wrong,
does not bring about an immoral act (here the relevance
can be seen of the distinction which I made about merely
material cooperation which is not antecedent, but subse-
quent to the wrong perpetrated by another). Such a person
neither does something immoral in order for good to come
of it nor tries to justify the (prior) immoral act of another,
but does no more than make use of someone else’s
immoral conduct, to do something good and to do that
for a good purpose, in this case to use a vaccine already
produced and for the good and urgent purpose of trying
to save lives.2 Here, it must be added that refusing a
vaccine that has been approved as safe and effective and/
or urging others not to make use of such a vaccine for
reasons of the scandal associated with its production does
not exhaust the moral responsibility of those acting in this
way. Those who reject any possible use of such vaccines
on the basis of the possible scandal associated with them,
in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, are
refusing to allow something to be done which is good and
even necessary to protect the health and even the life of

2 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 78, a. 4; here
St. Thomas discusses the moral responsibility of a person in real,
urgent need who seeks a loan from someone he suspects or even
knows will act as a usurer, concluding that the one making this
request does not sin where he does this under the conditions
just described.

52