Page 66 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

them is not automatically or even normally morally right.
People acting in this way and people giving such advice
cannot be said to be doing nothing other than condemning
gravely immoral acts of the past (abortions and the
manipulation of the tissues of aborted human foetuses)
because their acts and their advice, if followed, expose
themselves and/or others to possible serious ill-health and
even death and compromise efforts, also through vacci-
nation, to develop that herd immunity which needs to be
reached if the pandemic is to be brought under control.
The claim that they would bear some real responsibility
for the ill-health and even death that might be occasioned
by these morally imputable acts of theirs, through volun-
tarium in causa, would be plausible.⁴

i. Conditions for liceity

On the basis of what has been elaborated here, it would
seem to me at present that it is not necessarily immoral for
people to be vaccinated or to have those under their
parental or tutorial care vaccinated against the coronavi-
rus, on condition that they do not approve of the abor-
tions, do not give even tacit approval to what has been
done, and make clear their opposition to abortion in the
ways indicated. In the absence of, or in places where there
is an effective absence of, vaccines from non-compromised
sources (which appears to be the case at present), it would
thus be morally legitimate to make use of vaccines which
are not derived from the biological material, of aborted
foetuses, but have only been compromised by the use of
such material in testing (eg. the mRNA Pfizer-BioNTech
and Moderna vaccines), but, in places where even the
latter vaccines are not available, to use even vaccines

⁴ Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II–II, q. 64, a. 8.

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