Use of fetal tissue in vaccine development

The use of fetal tissue in vaccine development is the practice of researching, developing, and producing vaccines through growing viruses in cultured (laboratory-grown) cells that were originally derived from human fetal tissue. Since the cell strains in use originate from abortions, there has been opposition to the practice and the resulting vaccines on religious and moral grounds.
The vaccines do not contain any of the original fetal tissue or cells or cells derived from fetal materials. Although the vaccine materials are purified from cell debris, traces of human DNA fragments remain. The cell lines continue to replicate on their own and no further sources of fetal cells are needed.
The Catholic Church has encouraged its members to use alternative vaccines, produced without human cell lines, if possible. However, the Vatican has clarified that "all vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience, with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion".

Quotes

• Vaccines have been one of the chief public benefits of fetal tissue research. Vaccines for hepatitis A, German measles, chickenpox and rabies, for example, were developed using cell lines grown from tissue from two elective abortions, one in England and one in Sweden, that were performed in the 1960s.
  German measles, also known as rubella, “caused 5,000 spontaneous abortions a year prior to the vaccine,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious-disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “We wouldn’t have saved all those lives had it not been for those cells.”
  Fetal tissue was “absolutely critical” to the development of a potential Ebola vaccine that has shown promise, said Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, an associate director at NIH, which last year handed out $76 million for work involving fetal tissue, or 0.2 percent of the agency’s research budget.
  • Collin Binkley, Johnson Karla; (August 11, 2015). "Scientists say fetal tissue remains essential for vaccines and developing treatments". PBS NewsHour. Retrieved January 26, 2018.

• 18-6 Vaccines ok on temporary basis if no other moral alternative available to fetal stem cell lines
  “Parents and physicians may use the current vaccines without immoral cooperation in abortion “on a temporary basis” when no ethical alternative is available and “insomuch as is necessary in order to avoid a serious risk not only for one’s children but also…for the health conditions of the population as a whole”.
  When no other ethical alternative is available, “it is right to abstain from using these vaccines if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health”. (2005) (renewed 2015)
  • “Catholic Medical Association Resolution on Vaccines” (Renewed 2015)

• 18-7 CMA condemns pharma companies that participate in illicit methods to create vaccines
  AND BE IT RESOLVED,
  that the CMA condemns the illicit cooperation in abortion by pharmaceutical companies in the manufacturing of vaccines and encourages the use of ethical alternatives with opposition by all legitimate means to those vaccines with moral problems. And be it further resolved that parents and physicians “have a duty” to seek alternative product whenever available and that both parents and the medical professionals have a “grave responsibility” to call upon the vaccine manufacturers, the FDA and government officials to make products available as soon as possible that are not grown on cell lines procured from abortion. (2005) (renewed 2015)
  • “Catholic Medical Association Resolution on Vaccines” (Renewed 2015)

• Some people wonder whether the vaccines made using human fetal cells (chickenpox, rubella, hepatitis A, one version of the rabies vaccine, and one version of the COVID-19 vaccine) could cause harm if the DNA from the fetal cells “mixes” with the vaccine recipient’s DNA. This is not likely to happen:
  *Stability of DNA - Because DNA is not stable when exposed to certain chemicals, much of it is destroyed in the process of making the vaccine. Therefore, the amount of human DNA in the final vaccine preparation is minimal (trillionths of a gram) and highly fragmented. Because the DNA is fragmented, it cannot possibly create a whole protein that could be harmful.
  *Opportunity – DNA from the vaccine is not able to incorporate itself into cellular DNA. In fact, if this could be accomplished, gene therapy would be much easier than it has been.
  • "Vaccine Ingredients – DNA". Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. November 5, 2014. Retrieved December 8, 2020.

• WHO requirements for the use of animal cells as in vitro substrates for the production of biologicals. Biologicals 1998;26:175-193. 
  Cell lines of human (e.g., WI-38, MRC-5) or monkey (FRhL-2) origin are non-tumorigenic and residual cellular DNA derived from these cells has not been, and is not, considered to pose any risk.
  • "Vaccine Ingredients – DNA". Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. November 5, 2014. Retrieved December 8, 2020.

• Two cell lines currently used in vaccines are derived from selective abortions performed overseas in the 1960s; WI-38 from Germany in 1961 and MRC-5 from UK in 1966. Many excellent and thoughtful papers have been written on the ethics and religious aspects arising from use of these human cell lines.
  • “RELIGION AND VACCINES”, Institute for Vaccine Safety, (Updated March 4, 2021)

• Addressing Concerns for Catholics:
  *Catholic US bishops approve use of COVID-19 vaccines with ‘remote connection’ to abortion
  *“…as regards the vaccines [containing WI-38 or MRC-5] without an alternative, the need to contest so that others may be prepared must be reaffirmed, as should be the lawfulness of using the former in the meantime insomuch as is necessary in order to avoid a serious risk not only for one’s own children but also, and perhaps more specifically, for the health conditions of the population as a whole – especially for pregnant women.” 2005 Official Document, Moral Reflections on Vaccines Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses
  *“danger to the health of children could permit parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin, while keeping in mind that everyone has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available.” 2008 Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions [link to complete text – near the end of section 35]
  • “RELIGION AND VACCINES”, Institute for Vaccine Safety, (Updated March 4, 2021)

• Some people cite the Catholic Church’s objection to certain vaccines, such as the rubella vaccine, that were initially developed in laboratory cell lines that were derived from aborted fetuses. (The vaccines themselves contain no fetal cells.) The church has stated that in those instances members should find alternatives when available but that there is no religious obligation to refuse these vaccines. (Catholic News Service even ends an article on this subject with the wonderful: “Children and unborn children must not pay the price for ‘the licit fight against pharmaceutical companies’ that produce immoral vaccines.”)
  • Miriam Krule, “Why Is There a Religious Exemption for Vaccinations?”, Slate, (FEB 05, 2015)

• The lack of vaccinations of the population indicates a serious health risk of diffusing dangerous and often lethal diseases and infections that had been eradicated in the past, such as measles, rubella, and chickenpox. As noted by the Italian National Health Institute, since 2013 there has been a progressive trend in decreasing vaccination coverage. Vaccination coverage data for measles and rubella decreased from 90.4$ in 2013 to 85.3% in 2015, contrary to WHO indications that recommend 95% vaccination coverage to eliminate virus circulation.
  In the past, vaccines had been prepared using cells from aborted human fetuses, however currently used cell lines are very distant from the original abortions. The vaccines being referred to, the ones most commonly used in Italy, are those against rubella, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis A. “It should be noted that today it is no longer necessary to obtain cells from new voluntary abortions, and that the cell lines on which the vaccines are based in are derived solely from two fetuses originally aborted in the 1960's.” From the clinical point of view, it should also be reiterated that treatment with vaccines, despite the very rare side effects (the events that occur most commonly are mild and due to an immune response to the vaccine itself), is safe and effective. No correlation exists between the administration of the vaccine and the onset of Autism.
  • "Note on Italian vaccine issue". Pontifical Academy for Life, (July 31, 2017) p.1

• In 2005 the Pontifical Academy for Life published a document entitled: "Moral reflections about vaccines prepared from cells of aborted human fetuses" which, in the light of medical advances and current conditions of vaccine preparation, could soon be revised and updated.
  Especially in consideration of the fact that the cell lines currently used are very distant from the original abortions and no longer imply that bond of moral cooperation indispensable for an ethically negative evaluation of their use.
  On the other hand, the moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others is no less urgent, especially the safety more vulnerable subjects such as pregnant women and those affected by immunodeficiency who cannot be vaccinated against these diseases.
  As for the question of the vaccines that used or may have used cells coming from voluntarily aborted fetuses in their preparation, it must be specified that the "wrong" in the moral sense lies in the actions, not in the vaccines or the material itself.
  The technical characteristics of the production of the vaccines most commonly used in childhood lead us to exclude that there is a morally relevant cooperation between those who use these vaccines today and the practice of voluntary abortion. Hence, we believe that all clinically recommended vaccinations can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion. While the commitment to ensuring that every vaccine has no connection in its preparation to any material of originating from an abortion, the moral responsibility to vaccinate is reiterated in order to avoid serious health risks for children and the general population.
  • "Note on Italian vaccine issue". Pontifical Academy for Life, (July 31, 2017) pp.1-2

• The vaccine from Johnson&Johnson uses human adenovirus serotype Ad26 and full-length S-protein stabilized by mutations. In addition, it is produced using the PER.C6 cell line (embryonic retinal cells), which is not widely represented among other registered products.
  Sputnik V is a two-component vaccine against COVID has been tested Gamaleya Center in which adenovirus serotypes 5 and 26 are used. A fragment of tissue-type plasminogen activator is not used, and the antigen insert is an unmodified full-length S-protein. Sputnik V vaccine is produced with the HEK293 cell line, which has long been safely used for the production of biotechnological products.
  • "The Gamaleya Center statement". sputnikvaccine.com. Retrieved August 21, 2021.

“Catholic US bishops approve use of COVID-19 vaccines with 'remote connection' to abortion” (Dec 14, 2020)

CNA Staff, “Catholic US bishops approve use of COVID-19 vaccines with 'remote connection' to abortion”, (Dec 14, 2020)

• The United States bishops' conference has said that Catholics can take two of the three available COVID-19 vaccines, even though they were developed with a "remote connection" to "morally compromised" cell lines.
  In a statement released Monday, the bishops also said it is morally permissible in some circumstances to receive a third vaccine, developed in close connection with aborted cell lines, but that Catholics cannot allow the pandemic to "desensitize" or "weaken our determination" to oppose the evil of abortion.
• "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," said the bishops.
  Taking one of those vaccines, said the bishops, "ought to be understood as an act of charity toward the other members of our community."
• "The Holy See, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Academy for Life, has offered guidance on the question of whether it is morally acceptable to receive a vaccine that has been created with the use of morally compromised cell lines," the bishops said. 
  "Both the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Academy for Life emphasize the positive moral obligation to do good and in so doing to distance oneself as much as possible from the immoral act of another party such as abortion."
  The bishops also noted that "with regard to people involved in the development and production of vaccines, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explains that 'in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision.'"
• In 1972, a female child was aborted in the Netherlands, and cells from her kidneys were extracted and developed into the cell line now known as "HEK293." "HEK" stands for "Human Embryonic Kidney." Cells from the HEK293 line have been commonly used in biologic research since the late 70s. 
  The vaccinations produced by Pfizer and Moderna did not use HEK293 in their design, development, or production, but did use cells from the line in a confirmatory test, said the bishops. 
  "While neither vaccine is completely free from any connection to morally compromised cell lines, in this case the connection is very remote from the initial evil of the abortion," said the bishops.
  Conversely, the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca "should be avoided if there are alternatives available," said the bishops, as this vaccine is "more morally compromised." "The HEK293 cell line was used in the design, development, and production stages of that vaccine, as well as for confirmatory testing," said Rhoades and Naumann. The two compared the AstraZeneca vaccine to the current rubella vaccine, which also was reliant on "morally compromised cell lines." 
  In the case of the rubella (German measles) vaccine, explained the bishops, the risk posed to an unborn child and the community at large by the illness outweigh the morality concerns related to the development of the vaccine.
  "In such a situation, parents are justified in having their children vaccinated against rubella, not only to avoid the effects of rubella on their children, but, secondarily and just as importantly, to prevent their children from becoming carriers of rubella, as the spread of rubella can lead to the infection of vulnerable pregnant women, thereby endangering their lives and the lives of their unborn children," said the bishops. Rhoades and Naumann acknowledged that while Catholics should avoid the AstraZeneca vaccine in preference for one of the other two, it may not be possible for someone to do this without putting society at risk from the coronavirus. If this were to happen, a Catholic would be permitted to receive that vaccine. 
• "It may turn out, however, that one does not really have a choice of vaccine, at least, not without a lengthy delay in immunization that may have serious consequences for one's health and the health of others," said the bishops. "In such a case, just as accepting a vaccination for rubella with a morally compromised vaccine is morally permissible because of the lack of alternatives and the serious risk to the public health, so it would be permissible to accept the AstraZeneca vaccine," they said. 
  A person who refuses to be vaccinated, said the bishops, has "a moral responsibility to undertake all the precautions necessary to ensure that one does not become a carrier of the disease to others, precautions which may include some form of self-isolation."
  While the vaccines for coronavirus are permissible to receive despite their moral flaws, it is imperative that Catholics "must be on guard so that the new COVID-19 vaccines do not desensitize us or weaken our determination to oppose the evil of abortion itself and the subsequent use of fetal cells in research," they said. 
  "For our part, we bishops and all Catholics and men and women of good will must continue to do what we can to ensure the development, production, and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine without any connection to abortion," said the bishops. 

"Fetal Tissue Fallout" (August 12, 2015)

Charo, R. Alta (August 12, 2015). "Fetal Tissue Fallout". New England Journal of Medicine. 373 (10): 890–891. doi:10.1056/nejmp1510279. PMID 26267448. S2CID 205112031.

• A closer look at the ethics of fetal tissue research, however, reveals a duty to use this precious resource in the hope of finding new preventive and therapeutic interventions for devastating diseases. Virtually every person in this country has benefited from research using fetal tissue. Every child who’s been spared the risks and misery of chickenpox, rubella, or polio can thank the Nobel Prize recipients and other scientists who used such tissue in research yielding the vaccines that protect us (and give even the unvaccinated the benefit of herd immunity). This work has been going on for nearly a century, and the vaccines it produced have been in use nearly as long. Any discussion of the ethics of fetal tissue research must begin with its unimpeachable claim to have saved the lives and health of millions of people.
  Critics point to the underlying abortions, assert that they are evil, and argue that society ought not implicitly endorse them or even indirectly benefit from them, lest it encourage more abortion or make society complicit with what they view as an immoral act. Yet they have overwhelmingly partaken of the vaccines and treatments derived from fetal tissue research and give no indication that they will foreswear further benefits. Fairness and reciprocity alone would suggest they have a duty to support the work, or at least not to thwart it.
  • p.890

• Given the panel’s conclusion that research use of fetal remains is ethical, it seems clear that the needs of current and future patients outweigh what can only be symbolic or political gestures of concern. Indeed, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, while arguing for a right to refuse to use pediatric vaccines derived from fetal tissue and calling for development of vaccines through other means, nonetheless concluded in 2005 that parents’ duty to protect their children from illness justifies their use of current vaccines.
  • p.891

• By using the public’s unfamiliarity with the history and realities of fetal tissue research as a back door for attacking Planned Parenthood, abortion opponents have added millions of people to the collateral damage of the abortion wars. This attack represents a betrayal of the people whose lives could be saved by the research and a violation of that most fundamental duty of medicine and health policy, the duty of care.
  • p.891

"Vaccine Ingredients – Fetal Tissues" (July 13, 2020)

"Vaccine Ingredients – Fetal Tissues". Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. (July 13, 2020). (Reviewed by Paul A. Offit, MD on October 21, 2021)

• NOTE TO READERS: If a vaccine is not discussed on this page, it does not employ the use of fetal cells in production. For example, no influenza vaccine available in the U.S. requires the use of fetal cells for production.
  Vaccines for varicella (chickenpox), rubella (the “R” in the MMR vaccine), hepatitis A, rabies (one version, called Imovax®) and COVID-19 (one U.S.-approved version, Johnson & Johnson (J&J)/Janssen) are all made by growing the viruses in fetal cells. All of these, except the COVID-19 vaccine, are made using fibroblast cells. The COVID-19 vaccine (J&J/Janssen) is made using fetal retinal cells.
• Fibroblast cells are the cells needed to hold skin and other connective tissue together. The fetal fibroblast cells used to grow vaccine viruses were first obtained from elective termination of two pregnancies in the early 1960s. These same fetal cells obtained from the early 1960s have continued to grow in the laboratory and are used to make vaccines today. No further sources of fetal cells are needed to make these vaccines.
  The reasons that fetal cells were originally used included:
  *Viruses need cells to grow and tend to grow better in cells from humans than animals (because they infect humans).
  *Almost all cells die after they have divided a certain number of times; scientifically, this number is known as the Hayflick limit. For most cell lines, including fetal cells, it is around 50 divisions; however, because fetal cells have not divided as many times as other cell types, they can be used longer. In addition, because of the ability to maintain cells at very low temperatures, such as in liquid nitrogen, scientists are able to continue using the same fetal cell lines that were isolated in the 1960s.
  As scientists studied these viruses in the lab, they found that the best cells to use were the fetal cells mentioned above. When it was time to make a vaccine, they continued growing the viruses in the cells that worked best during these earlier studies.
• The retinal cells used to make the COVID-19 adenovirus vaccine (J&J/Janssen) were isolated from a terminated fetus in 1985 and adapted for use in growing adenovirus-based vaccines in the late 1990s.
  Adenovirus-based vaccines that cannot replicate when administered to people need to be produced in cells that have the necessary gene to allow for large quantities of the virus to be made. The retinal cell line, called PER.C6, was adapted to enable production of these altered viruses.
• Even though fetal cells are used to grow vaccine viruses, vaccines do not contain these cells or pieces of DNA that are recognizable as human DNA. People can be reassured by the following:
  *When viruses grow in cells, the cells are killed because in most cases the new viruses burst the cells to be released.
  *Once the vaccine virus is grown, it is purified, so that cellular debris and growth reagents are removed.
  *During this process of purification, any remaining cellular DNA is also broken down. To learn more about DNA and vaccine, visit the “Vaccine ingredients – DNA” page.

"Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines" (21.12.2020)

"Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines". press.vatican.va. Holy See Press Office. (21.12.2020) Archived from the original on October 3, 2021.

• The question of the use of vaccines, in general, is often at the center of controversy in the forum of public opinion. In recent months, this Congregation has received several requests for guidance regarding the use of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19, which, in the course of research and production, employed cell lines drawn from tissue obtained from two abortions that occurred in the last century. At the same time, diverse and sometimes conflicting pronouncements in the mass media by bishops, Catholic associations, and experts have raised questions about the morality of the use of these vaccines.
• Since the first vaccines against Covid-19 are already available for distribution and administration in various countries, this Congregation desires to offer some indications for clarification of this matter. We do not intend to judge the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, although ethically relevant and necessary, as this evaluation is the responsibility of biomedical researchers and drug agencies. Here, our objective is only to consider the moral aspects of the use of the vaccines against Covid-19 that have been developed from cell lines derived from tissues obtained from two fetuses that were not spontaneously aborted.
• 1. As the Instruction Dignitas Personae states, in cases where cells from aborted fetuses are employed to create cell lines for use in scientific research, “there exist differing degrees of responsibility” of cooperation in evil. For example, “in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision”.
  2. In this sense, when ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available (e.g. in countries where vaccines without ethical problems are not made available to physicians and patients, or where their distribution is more difficult due to special storage and transport conditions, or when various types of vaccines are distributed in the same country but health authorities do not allow citizens to choose the vaccine with which to be inoculated) it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.
  3. The fundamental reason for considering the use of these vaccines morally licit is that the kind of cooperation in evil (passive material cooperation) in the procured abortion from which these cell lines originate is, on the part of those making use of the resulting vaccines, remote. The moral duty to avoid such passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is a grave danger, such as the otherwise uncontainable spread of a serious pathological agent--in this case, the pandemic spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. It must therefore be considered that, in such a case, all vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive. It should be emphasized, however, that the morally licit use of these types of vaccines, in the particular conditions that make it so, does not in itself constitute a legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion, and necessarily assumes the opposition to this practice by those who make use of these vaccines.
  4. In fact, the licit use of such vaccines does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.
  5. At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable.

"How fetal cells from the 1970s power medical innovation today" (October 20, 2020)

Couronne, Ivan (October 20, 2020). "How fetal cells from the 1970s power medical innovation today". Medical Xpress. Retrieved January 5, 2021.

• It is no secret that thousands of laboratories around the world use cells derived from a fetus that was aborted decades ago to develop vital medicines. But it is a contentious topic in the US, where conservatives and anti-abortion activists have long deemed the practice unethical.
• "It's becoming annoying," Andrea Gambotto, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said of the controversy.
  Gambotto has used a cell line called HEK 293, the same used by Regeneron, as part of his research for 25 years.
  "It'd be a crime to ban the use of these cells," he added. "It never harmed anybody—it was a dead embryo so the cells back then (were used), instead of being discarded, they were used for research."
  The big advantage of these cells, which were developed in the early 1970s, is that they now represent a "gold standard" in the pharmaceutical industry.
  If Gambotto—who is leading a COVID-19 vaccine research project himself—one day succeeds, his vaccine can be produced anywhere in the world, thanks to HEK293.
  "You can go to India and make a vaccine for all the world," he said. To those who call for the development of alternatives, he says, "You don't need to go back 30 years and reinvent the wheel."
• The original cells were transformed and immortalized in January 1973 by a young Canadian postdoc by the name of Frank Graham, who was working at the time in Leiden, the Netherlands in the laboratory of Professor Alex van der Eb.
  Normally, a cell has a finite number of divisions, but Graham managed to modify these cells so that they divide ad infinitum.
  This was his 293rd experiment, hence the name of the line (HEK stands for "human embryonic kidney cells").
  "Use of fetal tissue was not uncommon in that period," Graham, a professor emeritus at Canada's McMaster University who now lives in Italy, told AFP.
  "Abortion was illegal in the Netherlands until 1984 except to save the life of the mother. Consequently I have always assumed that the HEK cells used by the Leiden lab must have derived from a therapeutic abortion."
  Vaccine developers like HEK293 because the cells are malleable and transformable into virus mini-factories. To grow viruses, you always need a host cell. It can be a chicken egg, but human cells are preferable in human medicine.
• In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, several makers have used HEK293 to generate what are called "viral vectors."
  These are weakened versions of common cold-causing adenoviruses that are loaded with the genetic instructions for human cells to manufacture a surface protein of the coronavirus. This elicits an immune response that the body remembers when it encounters the real coronavirus.
  Three vaccines that are in advanced trials use HEK293 lines—the Oxford vaccine co-developed with AstraZeneca, China's CanSino Biologics vaccine and Russia's Gamaleya Institute vaccine.
  Johnson & Johnson uses the other major fetal cell line, PER.C6.
  Several other companies, such as Moderna and Pfizer, have used HEK293 to develop "pseudoviruses" to test their drugs.
  Vaccines against Ebola and tuberculosis, as well as gene therapies, have also been created with HEK293 cells, said Graham.
  "I take great satisfaction from the fact that the cells I created nearly 50 years ago have played a major role in numerous advances in biomedical research and in the production of vaccines and medicines," said the professor, who dislikes commenting on the controversy that periodically emerges over their origin.

“Vaccines Originating in Abortion”

Edward J. Furton, “Vaccines Originating in Abortion”, Ethics & Medics, Volume 24, Number 3

• Many commonly used vaccines have their origin in cell lines that were originally developed from an aborted fetus. This poses a serious moral dilemma for those who oppose abortion. Two questions need to be examined: first, may a Catholic, in good conscience, use vaccines derived from aborted materials, or is one obliged to refuse them? And, second, may a Catholic parent refuse to vaccinate a child?
  • p.3

• Two human cell lines (MRC-5 and WI-38) that are used to grow these weakened virus strains have their origins in cells derived from the lung tissue of aborted fetuses (Dan Maher, “On the Use of Certain Vaccines,” unpublished manuscript [1998, NCBC]). Although these human cell lines could have been produced using cells taken from other sources (thus avoiding the moral problem entirely), the fact is that they were not. In many cases, there is no other choice than either to make use of a tainted vaccine or to forgo vaccination altogether.
  Thus “Meruvax,” a widely used vaccine for rubella (German measles) sold by Merck & Co., Inc., uses the WI38 cell line. The chicken pox vaccine “Varivax,” produced by the same company, uses both MRC-5 and WI-38. SmithKline Beecham offers a vaccine called “Havrix” that has its origins in MRC-5. “Havrix” guards against scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, kidney inflammation, and other hepatitis A infections.
  Whether immunization with these vaccines is permissible depends upon whether their use involves the Catholic in cooperation with evil. Briefly, formal cooperation arises when an individual shares in the intention or the action of another who does what is wrong. Immoral material cooperation occurs when one who cooperates makes an essential contribution to the circumstances of a wrongdoer’s act. Thus the question about vaccines derived from aborted fetuses concerns whether or not their use involves the Catholic in immoral cooperation with the evil of abortion.
  The answer, in short, would appear to be “no.” For it seems impossible for an individual to cooperate with an action that is now completed and exists in the past. Clearly, use of a vaccine in the present does not cause the one who is immunized to share in the immoral intention or action of those who carried out the abortion in the past. Neither does such use provide some circumstance essential to the commission of that past act. Thus use of these vaccines would seem permissible.
  • p.3

• One might object, however, that if we consent to the use of these vaccines, then we also consent to their origins in aborted fetal material. Such consent would represent a type of material cooperation with abortion. Yet another objection would be that use involves receiving a benefit from the immoral actions of others. What difference does it make, one might wonder, if the original immorality is now a part of the past? Most troubling, however, is the possibility that the present use of these vaccines might encourage future abortions. If that were true, then one might expect vaccination to constitute immoral cooperation with abortion.
  • p.3

• Neither does it seem that use of these vaccines will encourage future abortions. Regrettably, the cell lines that gave rise to MRC-5 and WI-38 began with tissue taken from aborted human beings, but these immoral actions were one-time events. Since their first beginnings, the cells used for these lines have continued to duplicate and grow in culture. There is little incentive to begin new human cell lines when these are well established and their various scientific properties well understood.
  • pp.3-4

• Yet another objection concerns the problem of scandal. When a Catholic allows himself to be immunized with these vaccines it may appear to others that he acts hypocritically. Catholics, it will be said, talk a lot about moral principles, but when it comes to their own health or that of their children, they appear willing to abandon all previous moral conviction.
  There would appear to be no objective basis for the charge that one who uses these vaccines cooperates in moral wrongdoing; therefore, any scandal caused by their use must be purely subjective in character. Appearances, however, can be important. For this reason, some Catholics decide to refuse vaccination in order to express their strong opposition to the practice of abortion. Still others are convinced, contrary to the arguments offered here, that vaccination does involve some form of cooperation with abortion. They believe that refusal is the only way to avoid complicity.
  Nonetheless, refusal appears to represent a course of action that goes beyond what is morally required. When carried out in the light of a fully formed conscience, heroic acts based on sound moral principle can be highly praiseworthy. That would seem to be the case here. Those in the medical profession who refuse to be immunized with tainted vaccines often suffer harm to their careers. Health care facilities require that all employees be properly immunized against infectious diseases. When health care employees refuse to do so, they can expect to be dismissed from their posts.
  • p.4

• Refusal also involves some risk that one will contract a serious and perhaps even fatal disease, though the danger is lessened when most others in a given society are properly immunized. This gives rise to a hope. If there were a sufficient number of people who were prepared to refuse these vaccines, would the manufacturers feel compelled to begin new cell lines that did not have their origins in abortion? The development of widespread public opposition to tainted vaccines might lead to the eradication of the present dilemma for future generations.
  Although initially appealing, there is one consideration that makes this scenario highly unlikely: parents have a moral obligation to provide vaccinations to their children. An adult may choose a heroic course of action that risks his own life and limb, but generally speaking, a child may not. The child is not capable of fully forming his conscience or of appreciating the risks that attend refusal of vaccination. Nor does it seem appropriate for a parent to refuse on behalf of a child and thereby risk the child’s well-being.
  • p.4

• Any widespread effort to force the hand of vaccine manufacturers would require considerable human suffering. Heroic refusals by adults are laudable, but parents have a moral obligation to secure the life and health of their children. As with so many issues of this type, it appears that the only proper recourse is to make appeals for redress to our legislatures and our courts. The true scandal here is not that Catholics use these vaccines, but that the researchers and scientists who bring us these products do not take into sufficient account the moral convictions of millions of their fellow citizens.
  • p.4

“Vaccines and the Right of Conscience” (Spring 2004)

Edward J. Furton, [https://www.immunize.org/wp-content/uploads/talking-about-vaccines/furtonarticle.pdf “Vaccines and the Right of Conscience”, National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly in spring of 2004.

• As a father of five, I have been confronted with the question of whether to vaccinate my children against rubella (“German measles”). As many now know, this vaccine is currently produced from a cell line that had its origin in abortion. Two other vaccines are similarly implicated in the tragedy of abortion: the hepatitis A and the new varicella (“chicken pox”) vaccines. As unfortunate as these facts are, an analysis of the problem, using traditional Catholic moral principles, does not seem to indicate that there is any obligation on the part of parents to avoid the use of these products. For my own part, therefore, I have not hesitated to have my children protected against these diseases.
  Nonetheless, there are many parents who have come to the opposite conclusion. They believe that it would be immoral to inoculate their children with these products. They hold that a vaccine with even the most remote connection to abortion is forbidden to them, and thus, they refuse immunization on the grounds of conscience. What is the status of this refusal? Can it be supported by Catholic teaching? We have a moral obligation to follow the light of conscience. Indeed, this duty is so fundamental that, even if one’s judgment is in error, conscience must still remain the standard of our conduct. To argue otherwise would be to say that we should do what we personally judge to be immoral.
  • pp.53-54

• The rubella vaccine, produced by the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co., Inc., uses WI-38 cells. There are two hepatitis A vaccines, one produced by Merck, the other by Glaxo SmithKline, both of which use MRC-5 cells. The varicella vaccine, again produced by Merck, uses both WI-38 and MRC-5 cells.
  • Footnote 1, p.53

• From a theoretical standpoint, therefore, the path would seem to be clear. Parents who reject all association with abortion should feel free to refuse vaccination for themselves and for their children. Nonetheless, when this approach is put into practice, many difficulties arise. For example, objectors often face a problem when they attempt to place their children into a school system, whether public or private. School administrators, who have both a moral and legal obligation to protect the health and well-being of their students (as well as their teachers, school administrators, and all who work there), routinely prohibit attendance by children who have not been vaccinated against rubella and other contagious diseases. Many states offer exemptions from immunization requirements; some do not or only for very specific reasons. Thus a state may accept a religious exemption, but may refuse one based on medical concerns if they are deemed unjustifiable. In cases where an exemption is denied, parents find themselves with very few options.
  The difficulty is heightened for Catholics because there is no official teaching of the Church on the question of whether the use of these vaccines is permissible. There are, it is true, various “probable opinions” issued by respected Catholic theologians and Catholic organizations, but the Church itself has taken no position. Thus Catholic parents who object to immunization with vaccines implicated in abortion can make no appeal to official church teaching, and if they attempt to do so, they are likely to be shown a statement from some recognized Catholic authority that contradicts their views. Can an appeal to conscience serve as a ground for an exemption to vaccination when there is no Catholic teaching on this matter?
  • p.54

• The exercise of conscience, therefore, is a type of rational decision-making. Given that no one else can carry out this task for me (another can offer me moral guidance, but I must accept or reject that advice according to the light of conscience), the Church recognizes that: “Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions.” Quoting Vatican Council II’s document, Dignitatis humanae, the Catechism adds: “‘He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters.”
  This would seem to indicate that those who sincerely believe that it would be wrong to vaccinate their children against rubella should be permitted to refuse immunization on the grounds of conscience. One might also appeal here to the priority of the family. The rights of parents in the care and education of their children should take precedence over any duty owed to the state. Under the principle of subsidiarity, decisions about the moral good should be left under the care of those who have the most immediate responsibility and not be usurped by higher authorities. Thus the decisions of the parents have priority over those made by the state.
  • pp.56-57

• But let us suppose that it should turn out that those who refuse vaccination are mistaken in their judgment. Let us say that the Church issues a directive stating that there is no illicit cooperation with abortion in the case of these vaccines. Nonetheless, the obligation to follow an erroneous conscience remains. We cannot oblige a person to violate his conscience, but we must respect that decision even if we ourselves are convinced that it is wrong. On all of these grounds, therefore, one can argue forcefully that parents who do not want to have any association with the practice of abortion, and who refuse to have their children vaccinated, should be free to do so.
  Certainly, it would be wrong to force parents to vaccinate their children. We cannot compel anyone to act against his will except as punishment for a crime. Beyond this, however, it is difficult to know what more one can be said about the refusal to vaccinate on the basis of conscience. Catholic teaching holds that there is an objective moral order that ought to guide the activity of conscience. Obviously, we are not free to decide whatever we wish—every moral person will agree on this point. The moral order that ought to guide our conduct does not depend upon the judgment of Church officials, but exists independently of all human decision. The mind must conform to reality in order to know the truth, but in the absence of any announced position by the Church, one can only appeal to the authority of one’s own conscience, which will hopefully be well-grounded in observation and sound thinking. The more our appeal takes its bearings from a knowledge of the facts and the true principles of morality, the more likely it will be that our exercise of conscience will successfully choose the good.
  • p.57

• One of the facts of this case concerns whether we should identify the right not to violate one’s own conscience with the demand for an exemption to a duly established public policy. One might easily argue that these two are not the same. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are not compelled to act contrary to their conscience under the law. If they are refused an exemption under some established public policy, then they will suffer the consequences of their refusal. Their children will not be permitted to enter into the local school system or some other public facility. This not a violation of conscience, but is a denial of an exemption. The case is not comparable to that of a Catholic health-care facility which is obliged by the state to dispense contraceptives because there is no compulsion to vaccinate one’s children. If one wants to appeal to conscience in order to justify a decision not to vaccinate one’s children, then the freedom not to violate one’s own conscience is all that can rightly be expected by the parent. The further claim that the exercise of conscience demands that the state must cede to the wishes of the parent for an exemption does not follow—at least, not as the right of conscience is understood by the Catholic Church.
  • pp.57-58

• I had previously said in my writings that the activity of the tissue researchers who produced WI-38 and MRC-5 was wrong because it constituted immediate material cooperation in the intrinsically evil action of abortion. A more detailed review of the evidence suggests that the tissue researchers played a much more direct role in the culture of abortion than I had realized. Hence, I revise my view to say that those tissue researchers were engaged in immoral formal cooperation with abortion. The activity of those who established these cell strains should be distinguished from that of the researchers who used them to invent the new vaccines. The latter, I continue to hold, were engaged at the level of immoral proximate material cooperation.
  • Footnote 11, p.58

• An exception to this rule would be the use of fetal material from indirect or spontaneous abortions, such as that recommended by Maria Michejda, M.D., in “Spontaneous Miscarriages as Source of Fetal Stem Cells” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 2.3 (Autumn 2002): 401–411.
  • Footnote 12, p.59

• Having considered the previous cases, we arrive at the question of what kind of cooperation with abortion obtains when a parent decides to immunize a child against rubella. The parent has no intention of participating in abortion and, living in the present, has no connection whatsoever to the abortions performed in the past. Neither does the parent make use of the cells taken from an abortion, but makes use of a vaccine that was grown in descendant cells. The capacity of these cells to duplicate in culture shows that their use applies little to no pressure on others to perform abortions. There is an abundant supply. If there were some remaining level of cooperation here, it could only be remote. This cooperation would be completely permissible because 1) parents have no choice but to use these products if they wish to protect their children and society from these serious diseases; and 2) the good that parents are seeking to secure through vaccination exceeds any harm that might be caused by that use. Thus it would represent a very harsh judgment, in my opinion, if someone were to say that unborn children must face the risks of serious birth defects or even death because others feel an obligation to make a strong statement against the evil of abortion. The fault surely lies with the original tissue researchers and, less directly, with the pharmaceutical companies or those who made imprudent decisions at the time these products were first manufactured. The fault does not lie with the parents and surely not with the children who suffer the risk.
  If the above reasoning is correct, and there is no immoral cooperation with abortion in the use of these vaccines, then we are led back to the problem of conscience from an entirely new perspective. One who properly exercises conscience will recognize that he has a moral obligation to protect the life and health of his neighbors and that he must therefore ensure that he and his children are vaccinated as a correct means to that end. He will recognize that there is a moral question at issue in the use of vaccines, but he will also see that there can be no justification for risking the health and life of unborn children who have had absolutely no hand in the original wrongdoing. He will bear in mind that his own children will learn from his decision and that the occasion presents him with an opportunity to explain to them how to think about difficult moral problems. The formation of conscience is a responsibility that a parent has toward his child throughout his time in the home. What will the child learn from a parent who refuses to vaccinate him out of an exaggerated concern that the use of these vaccines is immoral? Hopefully, the entire event will pass without his notice.
  • pp.60-61

• Prospects do not look good. The biotechnology company Crucell N.V. and Aventis Pasteur S.A. are seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to introduce PER-C6, a cell strain made from a fetus aborted at eighteen weeks. Even more disconcerting are the efforts of biotechnology companies to produce new drugs and therapies from embryonic stem cells. Some U.S. states have recently passed laws encouraging this research. Any new products made from these strains will be even more controversial than the implicated vaccines.
  • Footnote 15, p.60

• Let us suppose that the child who is not vaccinated contracts rubella while his mother is pregnant. Let us also suppose that this unborn child is then infected and born with birth defects. This is not an unreasonable scenario, especially for those who tend to have larger families. The most likely transmission is from a born child to one who is unborn. What will be the lesson that the child learns as he sees his brother or sister born with such defects? Will he say to himself, “Yes, we must suffer even this, in order to show our strong opposition to abortion”? Or will he say, “No, this cannot be right. How does the suffering of my brother or sister advance the cause of abolishing abortion?” This question would be especially troubling for a child who realizes that his sibling has suffered this calamity because he himself has contracted the disease and passed it on. The child should understand, of course, that what has happened was not his fault, but it may not prove easy for him to distinguish between his role as the source of the disease and his innocence of any moral responsibility. And if he is not to blame, who will the child hold responsible for this tragedy?
  • p.61

• No one should suppose that the position advanced lends any support to the claim that scientists should be free to work with fetal tissue in research. It should be obvious that those who set up arrangements with Planned Parenthood or other abortion facilities to receive the remains of aborted children, so that they can be used in programs of experimental research, are doing something that cannot be justified under any principle of Catholic teaching. The direct cooperation between the parties in this matter sullies the hands of those who receive the fetal materials and makes them cooperators in the evil of abortion. In the case at hand, I am talking about the use of the cells that descend from an abortion, cells which replicate themselves in culture, from which vaccines are made. That product is then made available for use by physicians. The level of cooperation in the two cases is radically different, as the above brief rehearsal should make plain.
  • Footnote 17, pp.60-61

• There is an even more fundamental question at stake. Can a parent exercise a right of conscience for a child? How can I risk your health in order that I might make a strong stand against abortion? This, in fact, is impossible because it is contrary to the very nature of conscience, which is always the personal act of a particular individual19 I cannot carry out an act of conscience for you. Only you can do that for yourself. But someone will say, “In this case the child is not old enough to decide for himself; therefore, the parent must decide on his behalf.” Exactly, and that is all the more reason to act for the sake of the child’s health. That is the moral principle that ought to govern all decisions in this area. Just as the demand for an exemption to a law mandating vaccination seems unjustifiable, so does the appeal to the right of conscience. No one can exercise the right of conscience for someone else—not even for one’s own child. All one can do is act for the sake of child’s life and health. Hence, an adult is free to appeal to the right of conscience in order to justify his own refusal to vaccinate himself, but he cannot appeal to the right of conscience in order to justify his decision not to vaccinate those who are under his supervision and who rely upon him for their medical care. We should not allow the one who carried out an abortion in the past to hold our children hostage in the present.
  • p.61-62

"The controversial cells that saved 10 million lives" (August 21, 2021)

Gorvett, Zaria. "The controversial cells that saved 10 million lives". www.bbc.com. Retrieved August 21, 2021.

• Then in 1962, Hayflick made another discovery. “Without it, you and I might not even be alive,” says Stuart Jay Olshansky, an expert in biodemography and gerontology at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
  It began when a nameless woman who was three months pregnant had a legal abortion in Sweden. As the author Meredith Wadman wrote in her book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, the foetus wasn’t incinerated, buried or thrown away – instead it was wrapped in sterile green cloth and sent to the Karolinska Institute in northwest Stockholm.
  At the time, Hayflick was sourcing the cells he used for his research from this institution. In his laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, he managed to incubate some of the tissue in several glass bottles at 37C (98F). He added an enzyme to break down the protein that bound the cells together, as well as "growth medium", a solution which contained the nutrients they needed to divide. After a few days, he was left with a continuous sheet of cells.
  One of these cells eventually turned into the cell line “WI-38”, which stands for Wistar Institute foetus 38.
• Over the ensuing years, frozen vials of the cells were flown to hundreds of laboratories across the world, WI-38 is now one of the oldest and most widely available cell lines on the planet. As Hayflick has noted previously – although perhaps rather insensitively – as early as 1984, WI-38 had become “the first cultured normal human cell population to ever reach voting age”. Today the cells are routinely used to make vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella zoster (chicken pox), herpes zoster, adenovirus, rabies and Hepatitis A. Why are the cells so special? And how can we justify continuing to use them?
• Soon after Hayflick discovered that cells are mortal, he realised that if you siphon some off each time they divide and freeze them, a single source can theoretically provide an almost unlimited supply – around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 sextillion) in total.
  And though WI-38 cells are mortal, because the cells had divided relatively few times when they were collected, they can be grown for longer before they reach the Hayflick limit. Most WI-38 cells have 50 divisions left, which each take 24 hours to complete, so they can be grown continuously for 50 days before you need to start again.
  Though there are hundreds of cell lines available in the United States, WI-38 makes up the majority of the cells used.
• Another reason WI-38 has become so ubiquitous is that a quirk of the American legal system at the time of its discovery: it wasn’t possible to patent living things. This means their use was never restricted, and scientists around the world were able to share them freely with colleagues.
  Though there are hundreds of cell lines available in the United States, WI-38 makes up the majority of the cells used, together with just one other.
  “MRC-5” cells, named after the initials of the Medical Research Council where they were collected, were obtained from the lungs of another three-month-old foetus. This time the abortion happened in England in 1966 for “psychiatric reasons”. WI-38 was fundamental for the development of vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella zoster (chicken pox), herpes zoster, adenovirus, rabies and Hepatitis A, as well as in the production of many early vaccines. Today it's still used to make the rubella vaccine – part of Merck's measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab – and Teva's adenovirus vaccine for the US military.
• Finally, foetuses are thought to be the “cleanest” possible source of cells, since they are less likely to have picked up any viruses from the outside world which might contaminate vaccines or confound the results of experiments.
  Back in 2017, Hayflick asked Olshansky to quantify exactly how many lives the cells had spared until that point. By comparing the global prevalence of certain infectious diseases in the 1960s, when the cell line was discovered, with the prevalence of  infectious diseases then, he calculated that vaccines made with WI-38 may have prevented around 4.5 billion infections. In total, the cells are likely to have spared 10.3 million lives.
• There has been some controversy surrounding the origins of the cell line, however. Apart from the fact that some people feel uncomfortable about its links to abortion, the woman whose foetus the cells came from, who Wadman has named “Mrs X”, did not consent to its use. In fact, she didn’t even know about it until years later, when she was contacted by someone from the Karolinska Institute who was hoping for a more detailed medical history. 
  The incident is unlikely to happen again today, because human tissue is regulated in the United States. Any material collected is subject to the Common Rule – a set of ethical standards introduced in 1981, which researchers must comply with in order to receive federal funding. Chief among them is the requirement for informed consent.
  However, the rule doesn’t apply retrospectively, and there are many examples of tissue which was effectively stolen and continues to be used to this day.  
• These ethical transgressions have become even more problematic with the advent of affordable genetic sequencing. Human cell lines contain human DNA – and WI-38 will share 50% of its DNA with the foetus’ mother. In this light, the cell line is considered by some as potentially representing a privacy risk.
• [T]he benefits of using the cells are widely thought to vastly outweigh them, and many religious organisations which are otherwise anti-abortion have publicly announced their support for the use of vaccines manufactured this way when no other alternatives exist, including the Catholic Church, although it did express a need for alternative sources of vaccines. 
• The connection between the chilling origins of many cell lines and the benefits they provide is perhaps most striking in the development of the rubella vaccine. Though it’s produced in WI-38 cells to this day, its early development relied heavily on cells taken from several different aborted foetuses – many of which had been aborted for the very reason that their mother was infected with the virus.
  Rubella can cause a number of serious consequences during pregnancy, such as stillbirth and miscarriage. If a woman is infected early on, she has a 90% chance of passing the virus to her unborn child, where it can lead to “congenital rubella syndrome” and a constellation of health problems, from brain damage to hearing loss.
  “You have to think, well what about the ethical consequences of not using the cell line?” says Olshansky. “Just keep in mind that they are a critical link in the chain, in the development of viral vaccines.”

“What the World’s religions teach, applied to vaccines and immune globulins” (2013)

John D. Grabenstein, “What the World’s religions teach, applied to vaccines and immune globulins”, Vaccine, 31 (2013) 2011-2023

• Unlike bacteria, viruses do not replicate on their own. To make viral vaccines, large numbers of viruses must be grown in cell cultures specific to each virus. Some licensed viral vaccines (i.e., some formulations ofhepatitisA, poliovirus, rabies, rubella, and varicellazoster viruses or combination vaccines containing such component viruses) are produced by growing viruses that infect humans in WI-38 or MRC-5 cell cultures. WI-38 and MRC-5 represent two commonly used lineages of human diploid cell cultures, batches of immature cells with twice as many chromosomes as sperm or egg cells. Embryonic diploid cells are valuable in vaccine manufacture, because each aliquot ofthese cells can propagate several dozen times before senescence.
  Each of these cell lines started with cells harvested from a deliberately aborted fetus. The cell lines are used to grow the viruses, then discarded and not included in vaccine formulations. These cell lines cannot form a human being.
  TheWI-38 line was developed attheWistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1961, with lung cells from a female fetus of 3 months gestation aborted in Sweden, whose parents feltthey had too many children. Similarly, British scientists funded by the Medical Research Council developed the MRC-5 line in September 1966 with fetal lung fibroblasts “taken from a 14-weekold male fetus removed for psychiatric reasons from a 27-year-old woman. . .”. These cell lines, still in use today, gradually replaced primary cultures of monkey, duck, rabbit, chicken, dog, or mouse tissue, an approach vulnerable to contamination with viruses and bacteria.
  • p.2017

• Vaccine manufacturers have few options for viral culture media, for reasons of microbiology and safety. It is not possible to simply replace one cell line with another, because various viruses grow abundantly only in some kinds of cell lines. WI-38 and MRC-5 lines are well described and understood, with experience accumulated via hundreds of millions of vaccinations, important for safety-assessment reasons. The fetal origins of WI-38 and MRC-5 cell lines pose an ethical or moral problem for people who disapprove of abortion. Critically, the two abortions were not conducted for the purpose of harvesting the cells that were transformed into these cell lines. This lack of intention is a key element in breaking the complicity link that could otherwise make use of the vaccines unacceptable. No additional abortions are needed to sustain vaccine manufacture. The cell lines are not the final product, and no human cells are present in the final vaccine formulations.
  • p.2017

• In the late 1990s—early 2000s, teams of ethicists at the National Catholic Bioethics Center and then at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life and elsewhere considered the virology, epidemiology, and theology of the matter in detail. Their considerations included both cooperation with evil and the principle of double effect. In this case, the cooperation related to those involved with the specific abortions in the 1960s. The principle of double effect applied insofar as using implicated vaccines today could appear to endorse or acquiesce to the acceptability of additional abortions in our current time. These teams concluded that the association between implicated vaccines and abortion was noncomplicit, and that using these vaccines is not contrary to a principled opposition to abortion. These centers reasoned that, because the abortions that enabled the production ofthese vaccines are in the past and (critically) the abortions were not undertaken with the intent of producing the cell lines, being immunized does not involve any sharing in immoral intention or action of others. In short, they are morally separate actions. In 2008, this position was elevated to the status of official Roman Catholic teaching.
  The bioethicist teams agreed that use of a vaccine in the present does not involve sharing in the action of those who carried out the abortion in the past. Further,they foundthatparents have a moral obligation to provide for the life and health of their children by means of immunization. The situation with vaccines differs morally from ongoing harvest of fetal tissue for pharmaceutical manufacturing or research, which could be used to justify future abortions.
  Still, these ethicists concluded that alternate vaccines should be used if available. They also recommended that parents and clinicians should speak out against abortion by asking governments and vaccine manufacturers to stop using cell lines that have links to aborted fetuses.
  • p.2017

• In 1964, the Wistar Institute developed the RA 27/3 strain of rubella virus. The rubella virus isolate “was recovered from the explanted [kidney] tissue of a fetus obtained at therapeutic abortion from a mother who had been infected with rubella virus”. The scientific literature of that era indicates that the abortion was not conducted with the motive of isolating the virus, but rather because the mother was infected with rubella virus and risked major birth defects. After the RA 27/3 strain was isolated, it has been propagated serially in human diploid cells. The RA 27/3 strain produced superior antibody responses and was better tolerated, compared with other rubella vaccine strains available in the 1960s. No further abortions are necessary to sustain the manufacture of additional batches of rubella RA 27/3-strain vaccine.
  Use of the RA 27/3 rubella virus strain was also considered by the National Catholic Bioethics Center and the Pontifical Academy for Life. Using the same logic, they reasoned that because the one abortion that yielded the viral isolate was not undertaken with the intent to retrieve the virus and because no additional abortions are needed to obtain more virus, being immunized is morally acceptable and also associated with parental duty. The same provisions for preferring alternatives and petitioning governments and manufacturers also apply.
  Some find it meaningful that rubella vaccination prevents many cases of fetal death and congenital rubella syndrome that would otherwise occur if women were infected with rubella virus during pregnancy. Immunized women exposed to the virus during pregnancy are no longer confronted with the question (what some religions might consider temptation) of whether to terminate their pregnancies on that basis.
  • pp.2017-2018

"Use of Aborted Fetal Tissue in Vaccines and Medical Research Obscures the Value of All Human Life" (2018)

McKenna, Kyle Christopher (2018). "Use of Aborted Fetal Tissue in Vaccines and Medical Research Obscures the Value of All Human Life". The Linacre Quarterly. 85 (1): 13–17. doi:10.1177/0024363918761715. PMC 6027112. PMID 29970932.

• The Catholic Church permits temporary use of vaccines generated using aborted fetal tissue to protect children from preventable diseases until alternative vaccines that do not use aborted fetal tissue are available. In medical research, cell lines that were generated from elective abortions should be avoided and alternative cell lines of licit origin utilized.
  • p.13

• The HAVRIX vaccine provides protection against hepatitis A infections (Innis 1994). However, hepatitis A is not endemic in the United States. Hepatitis A is also spread by the fecal-oral route; therefore, improvements in hygiene and sanitation significantly reduce infection (CDC 2006). Nevertheless, some individuals are at risk for hepatitis A infections, which can cause severe liver disease, presenting a grave inconvenience imposing vaccination. These include those traveling to areas where hepatitis A virus is endemic, men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users, those with clotting disorders, those working with nonhuman primates, and those having sexual intercourse with someone who has hepatitis A (CDC 2006)
  • p.14-15

• It is important to note that the use of these vaccines, generated from fetal tissue of elective abortions, can only occur on a temporary basis, as it represents a “very remote mediate material cooperation” (Pontifical Academy for Life 2006, 547) with the original illicit act of abortion. The distinctions between the different forms of cooperation were established by St. Alphonsus Liguori and can be categorized by the proximity of actions to the original illicit act. An example using vaccines generated from fetal tissue of an elective abortion follows:
  Principal agent: The mother who elects to terminate her pregnancy.
  Formal cooperator: The abortionist who agrees with the actions of the principal agent and supports her by performing the abortion.
  Immediate material cooperator: A nurse who does not agree with the actions of the principal agent but supports the abortionist in performance of the abortion.
  Mediate material cooperators: The nurse who does not agree with the actions of the principal agent but prepares her for the abortion and monitors her recovery post-abortion.
  Remote mediate material cooperators: The technicians at the abortion clinic that process and package fetal tissue for future use in scientific research. The scientists who arrange to receive aborted fetal tissue from the clinic for their research.
  Very remote mediate material cooperators: Individuals utilizing a product, for example a vaccine that was generated utilizing aborted fetal tissue.
  Even the distant cooperation represented by these vaccines needs to be avoided as it is:
  moral coercion of the conscience of the parents, who are forced to choose to act against their conscience or otherwise, to put the health of their children and the population as a whole at risk. ...[Therefore,] doctors and fathers of families have a duty to take recourse to alternative vaccines (if they exist), putting pressure on the political authorities and health systems so that other vaccines without moral problems become available. (Pontifical Academy for Life 2006, 549, 547–8)
  • p.15

• The human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cell line, derived from an elective abortion in the 1970s, is routinely used for production of proteins and cultivation of viruses due to the ease of transfection with gene constructs that are efficiently translated into appropriately folded proteins (Wong 2006). A PubMed search with the term “HEK,” lists more than thirty thousand citations, testifying to the extensive use of this cell line.1 The Catholic Church’s position on the use of HEK293 cells, or other cell lines generated from elective abortions, in medical research is that they should be avoided because other-wise this creates a “contradiction in the attitude of the [researcher] who says that he does not approve of the injustice perpetrated by others, but at the same time accepts for his own work the ‘biological material’ which the others have obtained by means of that injustice” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2008, no. 35).
  Again, alternatives should be explored. Utilization of fetal tissue from spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) is licit. In addition, COS-1 cells that are not derived from elective abortions are effective for production of proteins that could be utilized in some studies (Smith 2009). Unfortunately, COS-1 cells are of monkey origin. Hence, xenogeneic differences between monkey and human proteins limit their use in the generation of vaccines.
  • p.15

• Recently, two articles were published in the New England Journal of Medicine that char acterized fetuses of elective abortions, one being thirty-two weeks old, from mothers who contracted Zika virus in the first trimester of pregnancy (Mlakar et al. 2016; Driggers et al. 2016). These studies identified Zika virus in the microcephalic brains of the fetuses indicating an association between in utero Zika virus infection and microcephaly. More research on human subjects with similar experimental designs has been proposed to better understand fetal infection (Check Hayden 2016).
  These studies would also involve pregnant women who have been exposed to Zika virus infection that are followed for microcephaly by ultrasound throughout pregnancy. They would be informed of ultrasound results and, if microcephaly was demonstrated, would receive counsel on the prognosis of their child and options available, including termination of the pregnancy. If the mother elects to abort her child and provides her consent, the aborted fetal tissue would then be utilized in research procedures.
  This experimental design denies the intrinsic right to life of unborn human beings as the success of the study is predicated on the decisions of mothers to abort their babies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 45 Part 46 Subpart B, “Additional Protections for Pregnant Women, Human Fetuses, and Neonates involved in Research,” indicates that:
  The risk to the fetus is caused solely by interventions or procedures that hold out the prospect of direct benefit for the woman or the fetus; or, if there is no such prospect of benefit, the risk to the fetus is not greater than minimal and the purpose of the research is the development of important biomedical knowledge which cannot be obtained by any other means. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2009).
  • pp.15-16

• While the ultrasound procedure presents minimal risk to the fetus, diagnosis of microcephaly by ultrasound has the potential to place the fetus at greatest risk due to the mother’s decision to abort the fetus.
  To minimize the possibility that involvement in research will influence a mother’s decision to terminate a pregnancy, 45 CFR 46, Subpart B, indicates that, “no inducements, monetary or otherwise, will be offered to terminate a pregnancy” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2009). In addition, it “excludes researchers from any decisions as to the timing, methods, or procedures used to terminate a pregnancy, or determinations on the viability of the fetus at the termination of the pregnancy” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2009). Nevertheless, it is very challenging to design experimentation that identifies microcephaly in utero, which would not increase the number of elective abortions regardless of whether research scientists desiring aborted fetal tissue were excluded from involvement with patients’ decision making. Here, the Catholic Church’s perspective is invaluable: “sick and disabled people are not some separate category of humanity; in fact, sickness and disability are part of the human condition and affect every individual, even when there is no direct experience of it” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2008, no. 22). Therefore, only an experimental design that recognized the dignity and legal status of both healthy and diseased fetuses would effectively discourage elective abortion in research studies. This design would not only protect the unborn but also limit scandal (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2284), a behavior that leads another to do evil, from the actions of mothers and scientists.
  Development of a vaccine against Zika virus is a top priority; and as the virus infects fetal brain tissue, it is likely that cultivation of Zika virus for use in vaccines could occur in fetal tissue derived from elective abortions. However, alternative tissue that is not derived from elective abortions could be equally effective and should be investigated.
  • p.16

"Human Cell Strains in Vaccine Development"

"Human Cell Strains in Vaccine Development". Historyofvaccines.org. Retrieved January 5, 2021.

• Researchers have estimated that vaccines made in WI-38 and its derivatives have prevented nearly 11 million deaths and prevented (or treated, in the example of rabies) 4.5 billion cases of disease.
• Two main human cell strains have been used to develop currently available vaccines, in each case with the original fetal cells in question obtained in the 1960s. The WI-38 cell strain was developed in 1962 in the United States, and the MRC-5 cell strain (also started with fetal lung cells) was developed, using Hayflick's technology, in 1970 at the Medical Research Center in the United Kingdom. It should be noted that Hayflick's methods involved establishing a huge bank of WI-38 and MRC-5 cells that, while not capable of infinitely replicating like immortal cell lines, will serve vaccine production needs for several decades in the future.

“COVID-19 Vaccines & Fetal Cell Line History”

Immunize Nevada: “COVID-19 Vaccines & Fetal Cell Line History”

• Some of the COVID-19 vaccines being studied in clinical trials use cells originally isolated from fetal tissue (often referred to as fetal cells) in vaccine development or manufacturing. This research does not require fetal cells from new abortions; they use existing historic cell lines that are many decades old.
  Historical fetal cell lines were derived in the 1960s and 1970s from two elective abortions unrelated to vaccine development. Fetal cell lines have been used to create vaccines for diseases such as hepatitis A, rubella, and rabies. The fetal cell lines being used to produce some of the potential COVID-19 vaccines are from two sources:
  * HEK-293: A kidney cell line that was isolated from a terminated fetus in 1972
  * PER.C6: A retinal cell line that was isolated from a terminated fetus in 1985
  • p.1

• ARE THE PFIZER AND MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINES DEVELOPED USING FETAL CELL LINES? The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna do not require the use of any fetal cell cultures to manufacture the vaccine.
  Early in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, fetal cells were used to demonstrate how a cell could take up mRNA and produce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
  The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were found to be ethically uncontroversial by the pro-life policy organization the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
  Further, Brian Kane, senior director of ethics for the Catholic Health Association of the United States, in an interview for the America: The Jesuit Review stated: “In terms of the moral principles of being concerned about the use of any pharmaceuticals that were developed from aborted fetuses, that is certainly an issue that we all want to be cognizant of and try to avoid their use. With that in mind, the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines that are coming out are not even tainted with that moral problem.
  • p.1

• “When ethically irreproachable COVID-19 vaccines are not available … it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses.” — U.S. CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS
  • p.1

• IS THE JANSSEN (JOHNSON & JOHNSON) COVID-19 VACCINE DEVELOPED USING FETAL CELL LINES?
  The vaccine produced by Janssen does require the use of fetal cell cultures, specifically PER. C6, in order to produce and manufacture the vaccine. The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission have both stated that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine that requires fetal cell lines for production or manufacture is morally acceptable.
  • p.1

• The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has stated, “When ethically irreproachable COVID-19 vaccines are not available … it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process. However, if 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. Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson’s.”
  It should be noted that due to the fact that demand currently outpaces supply of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the overwhelming benefit of immediate vaccination weighed against the dangers of waiting, healthcare experts encourage all those eligible to accept the vaccine being offered to them.
  The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have also stated that “receiving a COVID-19 vaccine … should be considered an act of love of our neighbor and part of our moral responsibility for the common good.”
  • p.2

• WHY ARE FETAL CELLS USED TO MAKE VACCINES?
  To develop and manufacture some vaccines, scientists working with pharmaceutical companies prefer human cell lines over other cells because:
  1. Viruses need cells to grow, and the viruses tend to grow better in cells from humans than animals (because they infect humans);
  2. Fetal cells can be used longer than other cell types; and
  3. Fetal cells can be maintained at low temperatures, allowing scientists to continuing using cells lines from decades ago.
  • p.2

• “Receiving a COVID-19 vaccine … should be considered an act of love of our neighbor and part of our moral responsibility for the common good.”
  • U.S. CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS as quoted on p.2

"You asked, we answered: Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal cells?" (August 21, 2021)

James Lawler, "You asked, we answered: Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal cells?". www.nebraskamed.com. (August 21, 2021 - updated August 18, 2021)

• No, the COVID-19 vaccines do not contain any aborted fetal cells. However, fetal cell lines – cells grown in a laboratory based on aborted fetal cells collected generations ago – were used in testing during research and development of the mRNA vaccines, and during production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. 
• It is true that decades ago, scientists decided to use fetal tissue to start the cell lines we use to test drugs today. However, the description of ongoing modern fetal tissue harvesting to create vaccines is dishonest sensationalism.  
  As a practicing Catholic, I think the moral balance of indirectly benefitting from an abortion that occurred 50 years ago in order to take a vaccine that will prevent further death in the community is a no-brainer – especially considering that so many of the over 620,000 American deaths have occurred in the most vulnerable and marginalized in our society. We need to focus on saving lives right now. We need to care for our neighbors. 
  The Vatican and bishops agree. The Vatican has issued clear guidance that permits Roman Catholics in good faith to receive COVID-19 vaccines that use fetal cell lines in development or production. 
• Fetal cell lines are cells that grow in a laboratory. They descend from cells taken from abortions in the 1970s and 1980s.  
  Those individual cells from the 1970s and 1980s have since multiplied into many new cells over the past four or five decades, creating the fetal cell lines I mentioned above. Current fetal cell lines are thousands of generations removed from the original fetal tissue. They do not contain any tissue from a fetus.
• When it comes to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, fetal cell line HEK 293 was used during the research and development phase. All HEK 293 cells are descended from tissue taken from a 1973 abortion that took place in the Netherlands. Using fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness and safety of medications is common practice, because they provide a consistent and well-documented standard.
  For the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, fetal cell lines were used in the production and manufacturing stage. To make the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, scientists infect PER.C6 fetal cell lines to grow the adenovirus vector. (Learn more about how viral vector vaccines work.) All PER.C6 cells used to manufacture the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are descended from tissue taken from a 1985 abortion that took place in the Netherlands. This cell line is used because it is a well-studied industry standard for safe and reliable production of viral vector vaccines.

“Vaccines, Abortion, and Moral Coherence” (2022)

Daniel P. Maher “Vaccines, Abortion, and Moral Coherence”, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Spring 2002

• Quite apart from the health benefits and risks associated with using or not using vaccines, some people oppose the use of certain common vaccines—such as Varivax (for chicken pox) and Meruvax II (for rubella)—because of the connection between the production of these vaccines and elective abortion. The production of these and some other vaccines involves a stage in which viruses are grown in human cell culture. Because viruses can reproduce only inside living cells, they are placed in the human cell culture and allowed to grow in large quantities. The viruses are removed from the cell culture, inactivated or modified, and then processed further in order to produce the vaccine. There are two human cell lines that provide the cell cultures needed for producing vaccines. One of these lines, called WI-38, was developed in 1961 in Philadelphia from the normal lung tissue of a three-month-old female fetus obtained by surgical abortion.19 The other line, called MRC-5, was developed from normal lung tissue of a fourteen-week-old male fetus, aborted “for psychiatric reasons.”
  The WI-38 human diploid cell line … has been shown to have one of the broadest human virus spectra of any cell population that has been tested and is especially useful for isolation of rhinoviruses. The cells are free of contaminating viruses, mycoplasmas or any other microorganism and do not form tumors when inoculated subcutaneously into terminal human cancer patients.21 MRC-5 cells replicate more rapidly and are less sensitive to adverse environmental factors than WI-38 cells. The MRC-5 cell line, like WI-38 (ATCC CCL-75), is susceptible to a wide range of human viruses, is suitable for the production of viral vaccines, and has been useful in senescence studies.
  • pp.55-56

• See also the comments of Albert Moraczewski, O.P., as reported in a Pittsburgh newspaper article (source uncertain) by freelance writer James McCoy (“New Pox Vaccine Began with Abortions,” December 8, 1995): “Turning an abortion into a vaccine, Fr. Moraczewski concluded, means ‘being an accomplice to the act of abortion’.” Other common vaccines available in the United States produced using human cell lines are: Adenovirus Vaccine type 4 and type 7; Havrix and Vaqta (for Hepatitis A); MMR II (measles, mumps, and rubella); Imovax Rabies, Ipol, and Poliovax (inactivated poliovirus vaccines). It should be added that according to Roberge’s report, the strain of virus used in Meruvax is itself taken from a boy who was aborted because his mother contracted rubella during pregnancy. For this Roberge cites S. A. Plotkin, “Development of RA 27/3 Attenuated Rubella Virus Grown in WI-38 Cells,” International Symposium on Rubella Vaccines (London 1968).
  • p.55

• These cell lines are maintained in such a way that they have an indefinite lifespan, providing all the cells needed for the production of vaccine and for some other uses. It is said to be unlikely that any additional human cell lines will be produced or needed for two reasons. First, for scientific purposes, it is desirable to make use of well-known cell lines that have proven over the years to be useful for these purposes and to be free of complicating or contaminating factors (as described in the preceding quotations). Second, any cell line such as these must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which means that it is probably financially prohibitive to try to gain the same approval for other lines when these have already proven effective.
  This situation generates a difficulty for people who both oppose abortion in principle and would like to have the benefits of these vaccines. Opposing abortion “in principle” here means moral condemnation of elective abortion itself without regard to circumstances, motives, or beneficial consequences. The various reasons, theological or philosophical, that people might bring forward to support this opposition are not immediately relevant; it is necessary only that the opposition be principled. This kind of attention to moral good, i.e., moral good understood as decisively superior to goods of health and life, opens the door to a different order of opposition to vaccination. For using the vaccines produced in the manner described above appears to involve profiting from abortion and it is a question whether someone can both use these vaccines and oppose abortion without moral incoherence. Is the moral integrity of a person opposed to abortion compromised by benefitting from the research following the abortion, which research has led to the development of several powerful vaccines? Is it immorally opportunistic, vulture-like, or hypocritical for someone to take advantage of something he or she condemns as evil? Or, on the other hand, since the abortions have already been accomplished, is not the best course of action to pursue whatever good can be derived from these abortions? To answer these questions, it is necessary to try to determine the moral relationship of the use of these vaccines to the two abortions25 that have already taken place and to try to determine whether the use of these vaccines either condones or promotes further abortions.
  • p.56

• The analysis given below to these two abortions applies also to the third abortion (mentioned in footnote 18 above), from which has been obtained a virus strain (as distinct from fetal parts) and which therefore is not more directly involved in vaccine production.
  • Footnote 25, p.56

• The use of fetuses and fetal tissue in research was initially governed (between 1969 and 1973) by the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. The 1975 Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research added further qualifications, including that “those harvesting tissue could not have any part in the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate a pregnancy.”31 Following a 1987 Mexican report of improvement in Parkinson’s patients who had received fetal neural tissue transplants, the National Institutes of Health convened the Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel to consider ethical, legal, and social implications of this sort of research in the United States. “A substantial majority” of the panel members concluded that this was acceptable public policy, although they had some reservations concerning the need to separate the decision to abort from the decision to donate tissue. Despite this report, there was a presidential ban on federally funded research from 1988 until January of 1993, at which time the ban was lifted. The central concern in the debates on this issue has been determining the nature and significance of the connection of the research and transplantation to voluntary abortion.
  • p.58

• When aborted fetal tissue is transplanted into others for experimental or therapeutic purposes, the very use of the tissue uses it up and additional uses require an additional supply of tissue, normally made available by further abortions. In vaccine production, the currently available cell lines provide all the fetal material that is needed now and, apparently, in the future. Indeed, the success of these particular cell lines makes it unlikely that any new lines will be developed (whether from induced or spontaneously aborted children). Hence, the production techniques themselves do not require further abortions. The moral difference between vaccine technology and tissue transplantation is not changed by the fact that the product labeling for Varivax, for example, states that each dose contains “residual components of MRC-5 cells including DNA and protein.” These trace particles do not function in any sense as active components in the effectiveness of the vaccine.
  Still, it remains necessary to inquire into the relationship between the production of the vaccines and the two abortions that yielded the tissue. According to all available reports, in both cases the decision to abort was independent of the desire to make use of fetal tissue. In other words, the abortions would have taken place whether or not the cell-line research would have followed. This means that the abortions were not undertaken in order to produce vaccines or to fulfill any other research purpose. Moreover, nothing indicates that the vaccine production requires cell lines from electively aborted fetuses; tissue that is sufficiently healthy to produce cell lines of the type requisite for vaccine production might have become available from a fetus that died from some other cause. Granted, healthy tissue is more commonly found in electively aborted fetuses, but nothing indicates that such tissue is necessarily unavailable from other sources. These points suggest that vaccine production and, hence, use is morally separable from abortion, even though current production in fact depends upon cell lines derived from aborted fetal tissue. Vaccine production and abortion are morally independent, which is to say that vaccine use and opposition to abortion are in principle morally coherent.
  • p.59

• One pertinent detail that I have not been able to discover is the exact manner in which the tissue was transferred from those who performed the abortions to those who initiated the research. Did the research teams make it known that they were seeking certain types of tissue in a certain condition and did this influence the time or manner of the relevant abortions? This is significant because it can determine the moral quality of the initial research work relative to the abortions. This can be seen clearly by considering the differences between ordinary abortions and abortions that might be performed with a view to using fetal tissue for therapeutic or research purposes. In some of these cases it could happen that the manner of the abortion would be dictated by the need for certain amounts of, say, neural tissue in a certain condition. And so it might become necessary for fetal tissue collection to take place while the fetus still lives, or, more accurately, it might be necessary that the manner of fetal tissue collection itself be the cause of fetal death. If some similar relationship obtained between the original abortionists and the researchers who developed the cell lines, these researchers would be morally implicated in the abortion. Nevertheless, judging those actions is not now the primary concern. Knowing the exact manner of the transfer of tissue would be significant for evaluating the moral character of the initial research uses of the fetal tissue, but it is not, I argue below, decisive for evaluating the use of the vaccines today.
  • pp.59-60

• Showing how the initial researchers may have been cooperatively involved in the two abortions helps to make clear how vaccine producers cannot be understood to be cooperatively involved. In the context of vaccine production, the principle of cooperation is (at most) applicable to evaluating the relationship between the people who performed the abortions and the people who initially obtained the tissue. This is because the principle of cooperation applies only when there is some shared, cooperative action. The two fundamental kinds of cooperation are called material and formal. At the simplest level of analysis, material cooperation occurs when someone contributes something that enables another person to perform some action. For example, a nurse assisting at an operation and someone who lends another person money cooperate materially in the operation and in the use of the money. Theologians distinguish many degrees and kinds of material cooperation, some forms of which are so closely connected to the principal action that the cooperator shares in the moral responsibility of that action. Nevertheless, this is not always the case. For example, an employer pays employees and thereby cooperates in their financial activities, but the employer remains normally free of moral responsibility for how employees use their money.
  • p.60

• Now, in the present case, the only opportunity for cooperation in abortion occurs in connection with the initial transfer of tissue. Today, when a person receives a vaccine injection, there simply is no cooperative action with whoever performed the abortions. The vaccine user provides no material assistance in the abortion nor acts in such a way as to will that the abortions take place. It is true as a matter of fact that the cell lines used to produce vaccines come from abortions, but abortion is not essentially necessary as a means to this end. This does not mean that the use of the vaccine is totally unrelated to abortion, but only that the distinctions that help to assess cooperation in evil do not provide a coherent moral analysis. Considering the independence—not only in time and place, but also morally—of vaccination from abortion, one comes to see that one achieves a morally coherent understanding of vaccination without essential relation to one’s moral condemnation (or for that matter, approval) of abortion. The use of these cell lines for the production of vaccines is somewhat akin to the use of the organs of a murder victim for transplantation in order to benefit others. A murder victim’s organs are available because of a morally reprehensible deed, but their use to benefit someone else does not make the transplantation team or the recipient complicit in the murder. Once again, there simply is no cooperative action between the murderer and the organ recipient or even the transplantation team. Acknowledging that it is distasteful to draw personal benefit from another’s suffering, one must yet recognize that taking advantage of this situation in this manner is not, as such, morally evil or morally incoherent. Just as it would be preferable to receive organs without any murder having occurred, in the same way, it would be preferable if the vaccines had no connection with abortion. Nevertheless, the use of the vaccine is accidentally, not essentially related morally to those two abortions.
  • pp.61-62

• The only way in which this can be construed as cooperation is by turning the issue around and charging the abortionist with material cooperation in today’s vaccination. But this is stretching the matter. Even supposing that a part of the abortionist’s intended end were that the resulting tissue would become useful for therapeutic research, the indefiniteness of that end from the abortionist’s perspective would make it difficult to call him or her a formal cooperator in the production of vaccines. Even though the tissue taken from the abortions has been used for vaccine production, it does not appear to be the case that the abortions were undertaken as part of the means for vaccine production.
  • Footnote 35, p.61

• The argument above holds that the use of vaccines whose production involves the use of fetal cell lines does not create a situation of cooperation with abortion or complicity with the original abortions. This use is not, however, entirely unrelated to abortion, and the fact that using the vaccines is not cooperation in abortion does not settle the matter. The gravity of abortion might require us to make extensive efforts to avoid wherever possible association with abortion, abortion providers, and people who promote abortion in one manner or another. Donum vitae addresses this concern:
  The corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings. In particular, they cannot be subjected to mutilation or to autopsies if their death has not yet been verified and without the consent of the parents or of the mother. Furthermore, the moral requirements must be safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided. Also, in the case of dead fetuses, as for the corpses of adult persons, all commercial trafficking must be considered illicit and should be prohibited.38
  This excludes “complicity in deliberate abortion,” and if being complicit means being an accomplice, it appears that avoiding complicity requires avoiding cooperation in or contributing to the performance of abortion. If it is true, as has been argued above, that the use of the vaccines in question cannot be understood to be a case of complicity in abortion, it would appear that there is no objection on the basis of this text.
  The matter is, however, not so simple. The Latin version of the pertinent sentence—translated above as “Furthermore, the moral requirements must be safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided”—reads as follows: Praeterea, semper salva legis moralis praescriptio esse debet, quae excludit quamlibet cum abortu voluntario societatem et scandali periculum. Literally: “Furthermore, the prescription of the moral law ought always to be preserved, which excludes the danger of scandal and any association with voluntary abortion.” Now, excluding “any association” appears to be a stronger requirement than excluding complicity. An associate is more loosely related to some thing than is an accomplice. Still, societas is not a technical term, and it is necessary to determine what Donum vitae means by this wrongful association.
  • pp.62-63

• Scandal is a theological concern in the sense that its technical meaning involves leading someone to sin or causing confusion as to what is a sin. Even apart from the matter of sin, awareness of the significance of one’s actions relative to the moral instruction of others has special relevance to the question of vaccinations, which is a concern primarily for parents. That is to say, if parents endeavor to teach their children that some actions, such as abortion, are bad in principle, they need to consider carefully whether the use of certain vaccines does not constitute a source of confusion for their children, who might at some point become cognizant of the factual dependence of some vaccines upon voluntary abortion. Can one coherently and plausibly defend the view that abortion is bad in principle and that yet the use of these vaccines is good? Can one teach one’s children to understand this, or will it happen that they will understand the actions of their parents to belie their words? Will the lesson that is actually learned be that abortion is usually wrong, but sometimes it is beneficial, and that parents who try to hold otherwise are deluding themselves?
  • p.64

• In addition to concern for the moral formation of their children, parents making decisions about the use of the vaccines under consideration might also question whether this use would appear to others as indifference to the moral quality of abortion, thereby lending some positive encouragement to others to have abortions or perhaps leading others to indifference or misunderstanding. Here it is necessary to distinguish, in the traditional language, between scandal given and scandal taken. Scandal is given when someone acts in such a way that an observer can be expected to be led astray. Scandal is taken when someone is led astray upon observing another person’s behavior, whether that behavior has been rightly or wrongly interpreted. People who take moral matters seriously take reasonable steps to avoid giving scandal when possible, but there does not seem to be any limit to how much might need to be done to preclude the possibility of someone’s taking scandal by misinterpreting one’s own upright behavior. Plainly, it is sufficient to be reasonably cautious. This means that questions of scandal require prudence to evaluate the circumstances and the likely course of the actions of others. Consider the following two scenarios.
  Someone could argue that the use of these vaccines displays an indifference to abortion. Indeed, some people do appear to believe that if the production of the vaccines involves aborted fetal tissue in any manner whatever the vaccines must be rejected.41Knowing this, anyone using the vaccine must also anticipate that another person may take scandal at one’s actions, thereby leading the scandalized person to believe that the vaccine user does not genuinely oppose abortion, but only when it is convenient. In their own way, the children being vaccinated might be susceptible to this view. Further, someone could believe that the availability and use of these vaccines might lead to further abortions by allowing ambivalent women to take consolation that some good might come out of having an abortion. This possibility is remote, admittedly, and yet it is not inconceivable as a contributing motivating factor. Hence, this argument would lead one to refuse to use these vaccines, not because their use is in principle bad, but because someone else might through misunderstanding be led to some error.
  • pp.64-65

• “In carrying out research and treatment of human (or nonhuman) diseases, it is immoral to use embryonic and fetal tissue obtained from intentionally induced abortions. A major reason for opposing use of such tissue is that this is a form of complicity in moral evil,” William E. May, Testimony before the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel, February 2, 1994. See the comments of Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P., quoted in note 18 above. See also Henry Greely et al., “The Ethical Use of Human Fetal Tissue in Medicine,” New England Journal of Medicine 320 (April 20, 1989): 1095.
  • Footnote 41, pp.64-65

• Nevertheless, these considerations, while plausible, are not compelling. Someone could respond to these arguments, with at least equal plausibility, by saying that a woman deciding whether or not to abort her own child is likely to be completely unconcerned with whether the children of others have been adequately vaccinated. It is hard to imagine any drastic increase in the number of abortions because of vaccines; people have abortions for other reasons. Further, it could be argued that even if a woman were swayed in her decision by the presence of these vaccines, that would amount to no more than an excuse and a way to silence feelings of doubt or remorse. One person is not ordinarily responsible for another’s rationalizations. Finally, this argument would say that the bare possibility that some hypothetical woman might be swayed to have an abortion is not as significant as the genuine responsibility of parents to protect their existing children from harmful, even deadly, diseases. In some cases (e.g., rubella, varicella, and adenovirus), there is not available an equally good vaccine that is produced without the use of cell lines from aborted fetuses. Moreover, the health benefits at issue do not accrue only to their own children, but to all people within the community to which the children belong.
  In the face of these opposing arguments regarding the relation of the use of these vaccines to future abortions, it would seem that more than one practical option is morally coherent. People who want to make a strong stand against abortion could refuse to use the vaccines, assuming that they could find adequate ways to protect themselves and others from disease. When there are children involved, parents must recognize that they are responsible for reasonable measures to protect the children (and to prevent the children from being a contagious threat to society). This threat is no trivial element of what parents must examine when they consider whether their children will join them in making an equally strong stand against abortion. At the same time, someone else who understands and deplores the accidental relation of these vaccines to abortion, who thinks that his or her use of the vaccine will have no significant effect on any future abortions, and who finds no alternative, equally effective ways to guard against infectious diseases readily available could make use of these vaccines without falling into moral incoherence. No further harm is necessarily generated by using the vaccine; no obvious good is necessarily achieved by refusing it, and there are a variety of other ways parents might communicate the moral character of abortion to their children. Alternatively, some people might want to be especially rigorous in their opposition to abortion, much as some people will participate in public abortion protests. Such public opposition cannot be understood to be morally implied by opposition to abortion since it is unclear how or if those protests have any significant effect on the number of abortions one way or the other.
  • pp.65-67

• The rabies vaccine exists in two forms, one produced using MRC-5 cells and one produced using a fetal rhesus lung cell line. There are some treatment alternatives for preventing hepatitis A and poliomyelitis.
  • Footnote 43, p.65

• After all of this has been said, if one judges that the use of these vaccines is indeed morally coherent for those who condemn abortion, even if it is not unqualifiedly desirable, one must be prepared for a further challenge. If the use of these vaccines despite their connection with abortion were to become customary, and if people cease to be uncomfortable with the regrettable origins of these vaccines, it will probably become more difficult to maintain the distinction between the use of existing fetal cell lines for vaccines and the use of fetal tissue for research and transplantation, not to mention the various experimental uses of frozen human embryos. The distinction articulated above—between a noncomplicit, accidental relationship and an association that is incoherent with principled opposition to abortion—will probably become more difficult to defend in public. As the practice of fetal tissue research and transplantation spreads, the sorts of arguments presented above are likely to be recast and used in support of this sort of research and transplantation.47
  This suggests that it is rhetorically difficult to display the moral coherence of using these vaccines while simultaneously opposing proliferation of the therapeutic use of aborted fetal tissue. This difficulty is not decisive for the question of vaccines, but neither is it irrelevant. Whatever the future may hold in this regard, it is essential to think seriously about the moral significance of these matters. It would be irresponsible to condemn vaccines and other powerful therapies for superficial or accidental moral reasons. The health benefits at issue are considerable, and weighty moral reasons must be given before it is coherent to accept what may be a serious loss of control over vaccine-preventable diseases.
  • p.67

"What Aborted Fetuses Have to Do With Vaccines" (February 2, 205)

Neporent, Liz (February 2, 2015). "What Aborted Fetuses Have to Do With Vaccines". ABC News. Retrieved December 8, 2020.

• A small but growing number of parents who object to vaccinating their children on religious grounds say they do so because many common vaccines are the product of cells that once belonged to aborted fetuses.
  There is a grain of truth to this statement. But even religious leaders, including a future pope, have said that shouldn't deter parents from vaccinating their children.
• Some childhood vaccines, including the one against rubella -- which is part of the MMR vaccine given to millions of children worldwide for measles, mumps and rubella -- is cultured in "WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts," according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fact sheet on the vaccine's ingredients.
  Merck, the vaccine's manufacturer, acknowledged that those cells were originally obtained from an electively aborted fetus. They were used to start a cell line, which is a cell multiplied over and over again to produce cells that are of a consistent genetic makeup. The WI-38 cell line is used as a culture to grow live viruses that are used in vaccines.
• "Merck, as well as other vaccine manufacturers, uses two well-established human cell lines to grow the virus for selected vaccines," Merck said in a statement to ABC News. "The FDA has approved the use of these cell lines for the production of these Merck vaccines."
  Other common vaccines, including those for chicken pox, hepatitis and rabies, are also propagated in cells originating from legally aborted human fetuses, according to the FDA.
  "These abortions, which occurred decades ago, were not undertaken with the intent of producing vaccines," said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Centers Disease Control and Prevention.
  The original cells were obtained more than 50 years ago and have been maintained under strict federal guidelines by the American Type Culture Collection, according to Merck.
• "These cell lines are now more than three generations removed from their origin, and we have not used any new tissue to produce these vaccines," the company added in its statement.
  To say that the vaccines contain a significant amount of human fetal tissue, as some objectors to the vaccines claim, is misleading, stressed Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
  "There are perhaps nanograms of DNA fragments still found in the vaccine, perhaps billionths of a gram," he said. "You would find as much if you analyzed the fruits and vegetables you eat."
  And to remove human fibroblast cells entirely from vaccines is out of the question, Offit explained, noting they are necessary because human viruses don't grow well in animal cells.
  "They have also been tested for safety and the fetal cells can go through many more divisions than most other cells before dying," he said.
• Religious organizations have sided in favor of vaccines as well, even those generally opposed to abortion.
  "We should always ask our physician whether the product he proposes for our use has an historical association with abortion," the National Catholic Bioethics Center states on its website, but then goes on to say "one is morally free to use the vaccine regardless of its historical association with abortion."
  "The reason is that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine," the center's position statement continued. "This is especially important for parents, who have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them."
  Offit said he was glad the Catholic Church supports vaccination.
  He noted it is particularly ironic to object to the rubella vaccine using fetal cells because Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, commented on the subject in 2003, saying: "Universal vaccination has resulted in a considerable fall in the incidence of congenital rubella, with a general incidence reduced to less than 5 cases per 100,000 livebirths."
  In other words, Offit explained, the rubella virus increases the risk of spontaneous abortion.
  In the U.S., vaccination prevents up to 5,000 miscarriages each year in the U.S. alone, he said.

"How exactly fetal tissue is used for medicine" (July 17, 2015)

Storrs, Carina (July 17, 2015). "How exactly fetal tissue is used for medicine". CNN. Retrieved January 26, 2018.

• Fetal tissue has been used since the 1930s for vaccine development, and more recently to help advance stem cell research and treatments for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Researchers typically take tissue samples from a fetus that has been aborted (under conditions permitted by law) and grow cells from the tissue in Petri dishes.
  Many of the uses of fetal tissue – and much of the debate – are not new. “It’s just that the public is finding out about it,” said Insoo Hyun, associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.
• Despite the long history of using fetal tissue in medicine and research, the practice could be on the way out. Even though it has led to important medical advances in the last several decades, “in the future, the need for fetal tissue will go down because of advances in stem cell [technology] that will take over,” Hyun said. One of the earliest advances with fetal tissue was to use fetal kidney cells to create the first poliovirus vaccines, which are now estimated to save 550,000 lives worldwide every year.
• In the early days of making the vaccine, researchers infected fetal kidney cells in Petri dishes to produce a large amount of virus that they could then harvest, purify and use to vaccinate people. (The virus evolves to become less deadly when it infects cells out of the body, and thus could safely be given to people to prime their immune system for the real thing.)
  Today manufacturers of the polio vaccine use other types of human cells, which weren’t available in the mid-1900s. They also use monkey cells, which they originally avoided for fear that making the vaccine in animal cells could put people at risk of diseases from other species.
• Many of our other common vaccines, such as chicken pox, rubella and shingles, have been produced in tissue derived from fetuses, particularly two electively terminated pregnancies from the 1960s.

"Medical research: Cell division" (June 27, 2013)

Wadman, Meredith (June 27, 2013). "Medical research: Cell division". Nature. 498 (7455): 422–426. Bibcode:2013Natur.498..422W. doi:10.1038/498422a. PMID 23803825.

• The woman was four months pregnant, but she didn’t want another child. In 1962, at a hospital in Sweden, she had a legal abortion.
  The fetus — female, 20 centimetres long and wrapped in a sterile green cloth — was delivered to the Karolinska Institute in northwest Stockholm. There, the lungs were dissected, packed on ice and dispatched to the airport, where they were loaded onto a trans- atlantic flight. A few days later, Leonard Hayflick, an ambitious young microbiologist at the Wistar Institute for Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, unpacked that box.
  Working with a pair of surgical scalpels, Hayflick minced the lungs — each about the size of an adult fingertip — then placed them in a flask with a mix of enzymes that fragmented them into individual cells. These he transferred into several flat-sided glass bottles, to which he added a nutrient broth. He laid the bottles on their sides in a 37 °C incubation room. The cells began to divide.
  So began WI-38, a strain of cells that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers. Many of the experimental cell lines available at that time, such as the famous HeLa line, had been grown from cancers or were otherwise genetically abnormal. WI-38 cells became the first ‘normal’ human cells available in virtually unlimited quantities to scientists and to industry and, as a result, have become the most extensively described and studied normal human cells available to this day.
  • p.422

• Vaccines made using WI-38 cells have immunized hundreds of millions of people against rubella, rabies, adenovirus, polio, measles, chickenpox and shingles. In the 1960s and 1970s, the cells helped epidemiologists to identify viral culprits in disease outbreaks. Their normality has made them valuable control cells for comparison with diseased ones. And at the Wistar Institute, as in labs and universities around the world, they remain a leading tool for probing the secrets of cellular ageing and cancer.
  “Here’s a clump of cells that has had an enormous impact on human health,” says Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “These cells from one fetus have no doubt saved the lives of millions of people.”
  Few people, however, know the troubled history of the cells — one that may offer lessons for modern researchers seeking to work with human tissues. Six years after deriving his famous strain, Hayflick made off with stocks of the cells and later started to charge for shipping them, prompting an epic legal battle with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, about who owned the cells. That struggle nearly destroyed Hayflick’s career and raised questions about whether and how scientists should profit from their inventions.
  • pp.422-423

• What’s more, the WI-38 strain has helped to generate billions of dollars for companies that produce vaccines based on the cells, yet it seems that the parents of the fetus have earned nothing. That recalls the earlier development of the HeLa cell line, named after the woman whose tumour gave rise to the cells and chronicled in Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2010). As with HeLa, the WI-38 case highlights questions about if, and how, tissue donors should be compensated that are still urgently debated today. Last month, for example, some scientists in the United States found themselves barred from using new stem-cell lines derived from human embryos because women had been paid for the eggs used to make them (see Nature http://doi.org/mv2; 2013).
  The story of WI-38, unlike that of HeLa, also has its own controversial twist because it was derived from an aborted fetus. For 40 years, anti-abortion activists have protested against the use of WI-38 and vaccines developed from it. “It’s still a live issue,” says Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. “We still have people who refuse to take these vaccines because of their origins in fetal tissue.
  • p.423

• When Hayflick opened up that icy package from Sweden in 1962, he was working at the vanguard of virus research in the United States. At the time, the Wistar Institute was led by Hilary Koprowski, a polio-vaccine pioneer who hired Hayflick to run the centre’s cell-culture laboratory and supply cells to researchers. But Hayflick also began investigating whether some human cancers might be caused by viruses. To do so, he needed a resource that did not yet exist: verifiably normal human cells that could be reliably grown in the lab. Fetal cells, he thought, were an ideal candidate, because they were less likely to have been exposed to viruses than adult cells.
  Although abortions were technically illegal in Pennsylvania at the time, they were still performed when doctors said they were medically necessary. Hayflick says he was able to obtain fetuses straight from the operating room of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital across the street from Wistar. Unless the tissue was put to some use, he reasoned, “it was definitely going to end up in an incinerator”. The University of Pennsylvania says that it is unable to find records to confirm the source of fetal tissues used by Hayflick.
  Hayflick developed 25 different fetal-cell strains, numbered WI-1 to WI-25. But several months into the project, he began to notice something strange. Scientific orthodoxy held that cells in culture, properly treated, would replicate forever. But his oldest cell strains were beginning to replicate more slowly. Eventually, they stopped dividing altogether.
  • p.423

• WI-38 found a greater use in virology, where the ease of infecting the cells with a panoply of human viruses quickly made the strain an important virus-identification tool. In 1967, the cells became a workhorse in a World Health Organization survey of viruses causing lower respiratory tract infections in hospitalized children on four continents.
  • p.423-424

• Hayflick also supplied WI-38 liberally to aspiring vaccine-makers. One was Stanley Plotkin, a Wistar scientist and a physician who had seen at first hand the effects of the huge rubella epidemic that swept the United Kingdom and the United States in the early 1960s. Rubella can be devastating to fetuses whose mothers are infected: those that are not killed in utero are frequently born blind, deaf, mentally disabled or with some combination of these conditions.
  Working at the Wistar, Plotkin grew rubella in WI-38 at 30 °C, cooler than body temperature, creating a weakened strain that still fired up the immune system enough to protect against future infections. Trials showed that his vaccine induced better immunity against rubella than competitors.
  Plotkin’s vaccine was licensed in Europe in 1970 and in the United States in 1979. A version made by the pharmaceutical company Merck, based in New Jersey, is today the only rubella vaccine available in the United States, and GlaxoSmithKline uses Plotkin’s weakened virus in a rubella vaccine that it markets in Europe and Australia.
  The rubella vaccine was only one of many made using WI-38. In the 1960s, a WI-38-based measles vaccine was licensed in the former Soviet Union and Koprowski developed a rabies vaccine using the cells. In the early 1970s, the pharmaceutical company Wyeth (now part of Pfizer) launched an oral adenovirus vaccine developed using WI-38 and Pfizer, based in New York, used WI-38 to make a vaccine against polio. Today, the cells are also used by Merck to make vaccines against chickenpox and the painful nerve infection shingles.
  • p.424

• Hayflick explains that, contrary to common practice in 1962, he had not laced the cells with antibiotics at the outset because vaccine manufacturers feared allergic reactions to the drugs.
  Shortly before the Science article was published, Hayflick sued the NIH. He argued that the agency had violated the 1974 Privacy Act by making his name and the allegations against him available under the FOIA without including his rebuttal. He also sued for title to WI-38 and its proceeds. By then, Hayflick was also facing a criminal investigation: Stanford University had alerted local prosecutors that the case could be one of criminal theft of government property. (The prosecutors subsequently found no grounds for criminal investigation and dropped the case.) Meanwhile, some vaccine manufacturers, fearing that there would not be enough stock of WI-38 to meet future needs, switched much of their work to an alternative fetal cell strain, MRC-5.
  • p.424-425

• “Other vaccines are produced in a completely morally non-objectionable way. So why aren’t we doing this with all vaccines?” says Debi Vinnedge, the executive director of Children of God for Life, a group based in Largo, Florida, that opposes the use of WI-38 in vaccine-making. In 2003, Vinnedge wrote to the Vatican asking for an official position on whether Catholics could ethically receive vaccines made using cells from aborted fetuses. She waited two years for an answer.
  The letter, when it came, concluded that where no alternative exists, it is “lawful” for parents to have their children immunized with vaccines made using WI-38 and MRC-5, to avoid serious risk to their own offspring and to the population as a whole.
  Still, the Vatican wrote, faithful Catholics should “employ every lawful means in order to make life difficult for the pharmaceutical industries” that use such cells. Merck, a major producer of Plotkin’s rubella vaccine, has been a perennial target of abortion opponents, who have pressed the issue at Merck’s US shareholder meetings. (Merck said in a statement to Nature that “it would be exceedingly difficult, if at all possible, to develop and test an alternative”, and emphasized the vaccine’s long record of safety and effectiveness.) The irony of the protest is not lost on Plotkin. “I am fond of saying that rubella vaccine has prevented thousands more abortions than have ever been prevented by Catholic religionists,” he says.
  • p.425

• Profits from Merck’s rubella vaccine represent a big slice of the billions of dollars that have been made from products that have involved the use of WI-38. Among the other companies that have made money from WI-38 are Barr Laboratories (now part of Teva Pharmaceuticals, based in Petach Tikva, Israel), which today makes the adenovirus vaccine given to all US military recruits, and Sigma Aldrich in St Louis, Missouri, which charges $424 in the United States for a vial of the cells.
  Legal experts say it is unlikely that the parents of the fetus, or their heirs, would have any legal grounds to demand compensation for tissue collected over 50 years ago. At the time that WI-38 was derived, use of tissue without consent was routine in the United States, as it was in Sweden. Under current rules, researchers supported by US government grants are free to make use of surgically removed tissue — including aborted tissue — that has been stripped of its identifiers, without consent. However, some states have stricter rules.
  But, says Charo, “if we continue to debate it entirely in legal terms, it feels like we’re missing the emotional centre of the story”. It could be argued, she says, “that if somebody else is making a fortune off of this, they ought to share the wealth. It’s not a legal judgment. It’s a judgement about morality.”
  • pp.425-426

• If nothing else, the WI-38 story highlights the benefits of discussing the issues of compensation and consent with tissue donors at the outset. In the case of WI-38, suggests Charo, returning to the donor now, even with an offer of compensation, “may also be a way of re opening an experience that may for her have been painful. You have to be careful.”
  Hayflick argues that there are at least four stakeholders with title to WI-38 or any human cell culture: the tissue donors, the scientists whose work gave it value, the scientists’ institution and the body that funded the work. “Like me”, he adds, “hundreds of other scientists had their careers advanced using WI-38 and other human cell cultures so we all owe a moral debt to the tissue donors.”
  • p.426

"Fact-checking Congress's fetal tissue report" (January 5, 2017)

Wadman, Meredith (January 5, 2017). "Fact-checking Congress's fetal tissue report". Science. Retrieved January 26, 2018.

• Human fetal kidney cells were used to develop Genentech’s Pulmozyme, which helps clear thick mucus from the lungs of children with cystic fibrosis. 
• Chaired by Representative Marsha Blackburn (R–TN), who is now helping steer President-elect Donald Trump's transition, the panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued, as it exited the stage, a 413-page Final Report. Besides targeting Planned Parenthood, which receives more than $500 million annually in federal funding, much of it through the Medicaid health program for the poor, the report also takes to task research institutions, other abortion providers, and the companies that process and prepare fetal tissue for researchers. It accuses some of illegally profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, which is forbidden under the 1993 law. And it cites numerous examples to conclude that "human fetal tissue research makes a vanishingly small contribution to clinical and research efforts." But a close look at those claims reveals inaccuracies; a sampling follows:
  Report, p. xxxix:
  "In over 100 years of unrestricted clinical research, human fetal tissue has failed to provide a single medical treatment …"
  Fact: Several important medicines now on the market were created using fetal tissue. Amgen's Enbrel battles rheumatoid arthritis; Genentech's Pulmozyme helps children with cystic fibrosis clear the thick mucus that clogs their lungs; and Nuwiq, made by Octapharma, treats boys and men with hemophilia, a life-threatening bleeding disorder.
• Report, p. 379:
  "Several letters [from the Association of American Medical Colleges and others] … suggest that human fetal tissue is used for modern vaccine production. In reality, none of the nearly 75 vaccine formulations currently licensed in the United States is produced using human fetal tissue …"
  Fact: The WI-38 and MRC-5 cell lines, derived from two fetuses that were aborted, respectively, in 1962 in Sweden and in 1966 in the United Kingdom, are used to produce the following vaccines, all licensed and marketed in the United States:
  *Sanofi-Pasteur's Imovax rabies vaccine is propagated in MRC-5 cells. When they were introduced in the 1970s, human fetal cell–propagated rabies vaccines supplanted dangerous and occasionally fatal animal tissue–produced rabies vaccines.
  * Merck's chicken pox and shingles vaccines are propagated in MRC-5 cells; they are produced at a relatively new company plant in North Carolina. The weakened "Oka" virus used in both vaccines was initially attenuated in WI-38 cells. *
  Merck's rubella vaccine—the "R" component in the MMR vaccine given to U.S. infants and preschoolers—is propagated in WI-38 cells on the company's campus northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Merck has shipped nearly 700 million doses of the rubella vaccine since its launch in 1979. Also known as German measles, rubella, like Zika virus, attacks and damages fetuses in the womb.
  *Hepatitis A vaccines are marketed in the United States by both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline; both companies propagate their vaccines in MRC-5 cells.
  *The polio component of Sanofi Pasteur's U.S.-marketed Quadracel vaccine (which also protects against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus) is propagated in MRC-5 cells.
  *The adenovirus vaccine that since 1970 has protected nearly 10 million members of the U.S. military from respiratory infections is propagated using WI-38 cells.
  (In seeming contradiction, the report goes on to state, one page later, that "11 [current vaccines] … are produced using historic, fetal-derived cell lines.")
• Report, p 376:
  "… human fetal tissue has never been used to make the polio vaccine."
  Fact: Virologists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden used fetal cells to propagate a polio vaccine in the mid-1950s; it was given to some 2000 schoolchildren. In 1967 and 1968, Yugoslavia conducted a mass polio vaccination campaign using polio virus propagated in WI-38 cells; Sweden and Switzerland had already run trials of the same vaccine. In the early 1970s, Pfizer launched a polio vaccine propagated in WI-38 cells in the United States. And the French vaccinemaker Sanofi Pasteur uses MRC-5 cells to make polio vaccine to this day.

"Abortion opponents protest COVID-19 vaccines' use of fetal cells" (8 June 2020)

Wadman, Meredith. "Abortion opponents protest COVID-19 vaccines' use of fetal cells". Science. (Clarification, 8 June 2020)

• Senior Catholic leaders in the United States and Canada, along with other antiabortion groups, are raising ethical objections to promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates that are manufactured using cells derived from human fetuses electively aborted decades ago. They have not sought to block government funding for the vaccines, which include two candidate vaccines that the Trump administration plans to support with an investment of up to $1.7 billion, as well as a third candidate made by a Chinese company in collaboration with Canada's National Research Council (NRC). But they are urging funders and policymakers to ensure that companies develop other vaccines that do not rely on such human fetal cell lines and, in the United States, asking the government to "incentivize" firms to only make vaccines that don't rely on fetal cells.
  "It is critically important that Americans have access to a vaccine that is produced ethically: no American should be forced to choose between being vaccinated against this potentially deadly virus and violating his or her conscience," members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and 20 other religious, medical, and political organizations that oppose abortion wrote to Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in April. "Thankfully, other [COVID-19] vaccines … utilize cell lines not connected to unethical procedures and methods."
  "We urge your government to fund the development of vaccines that do not create an ethical dilemma for many Canadians," wrote Archbishop of Winnipeg Richard Gagnon, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, and 17 other antiabortion religious, medical, and politic groups and individuals in a 21 May letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "The … manufacture of vaccines using such ethically-tainted human cell lines demonstrates profound disrespect for the dignity of the human person."
• Cells derived from elective abortions have been used since the 1960s to manufacture vaccines, including current vaccines against rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis A, and shingles. They have also been used to make approved drugs against diseases including hemophilia, rheumatoid arthritis, and cystic fibrosis. Now, research groups around the world are working to develop more than 130 candidate vaccines against COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization; 10 had entered human trials as of 2 June.
  At least five of the candidate COVID-19 vaccines use one of two human fetal cell lines: HEK-293, a kidney cell line widely used in research and industry that comes from a fetus aborted in about 1972; and PER.C6, a proprietary cell line owned by Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, developed from retinal cells from an 18-week-old fetus aborted in 1985. Both cell lines were developed in the lab of molecular biologist Alex van der Eb at Leiden University. Two of the five vaccines have entered human trials (see table, below).
  In four of the vaccines, the human fetal cells are used as miniature "factories" to generate vast quantities of adenoviruses, disabled so that they cannot replicate, that are used as vehicles to ferry genes from the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. When the adenoviruses are given as a vaccine, recipients' cells begin to produce proteins from the coronavirus, hopefully triggering a protective immune response.
  The fifth vaccine, which has shown promise in monkeys and is headed for human trials as soon as this summer, is what is known as a protein subunit vaccine. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh use HEK-293 cells to manufacture the coronavirus' spike protein—a vital part of its structure—which is used to trigger an immune response. The vaccine is delivered through a skin patch with 400 tiny needles.
  The fetal cell lines are key to producing both types of vaccine. "HEK-293 [cells] are essential for making protein subunit vaccines," says Andrea Gambotto, a vaccine scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the vaccine's lead developer. Their human origin is important, he says: "Cultured [nonhuman] animal cells can produce the same proteins, but they would be decorated with different sugar molecules, which—in the case of vaccines—runs the risk of failing to evoke a robust and specific immune response." (Among the developers of the five vaccines, only Gambotto responded to a request for comment.)
• David Prentice, vice president and research director at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which opposes abortion, notes researchers making adenovirus vaccines have modified HEK-293 cells to be adept at packaging new genes—such as those that direct cells to assemble the coronavirus spike protein—into adenoviruses. But he adds that other technologies are available, including using cells captured from amniocentesis that are engineered to make replication-deficient adenoviruses.
  "The use of cells from electively aborted fetuses for vaccine production makes these five COVID-19 vaccine programs unethical, because they exploit the innocent human beings who were aborted," Prentice and a co-author—molecular biologist James Sherley, a Lozier Institute associate scholar and director of the adult stem cell company Asymmetrex—wrote in a position paper published last month.
• Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the New York University School of Medicine, counters: "There are better ways to win the abortion wars than telling people not to use a vaccine. These are long-over abortions. These cells are decades old, and even major religious leaders like the pope have acknowledged that for the greater good it's not worth the symbolism to put the community at risk." * The Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life declared in 2005 and reaffirmed in 2017 that in the absence of alternatives, Catholics could, in good conscience, receive vaccines made using historical human fetal cell lines.
• A vaccine made by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics was the first COVID-19 vaccine to enter phase II human trials. It was developed using adapted HEK-293 cells that the company licensed from Canada's NRC, where the cells were developed. (NRC-developed HEK-293 cells have already been used to develop an approved Ebola vaccine.) Last month, NRC announced a collaboration with CanSino Biologics under which it is preparing to run late-stage clinical trials of the vaccine in Canada, and scale up facilities to produce the vaccine in quantity.
• One of the Warp Speed candidates, made by Janssen Research & Development, uses PER.C6 cells. The second, from University of Oxford researchers and AstraZeneca, uses HEK-293 cells. Both have received U.S. government commitments of, respectively, $456 million and $1.2 billion, if they meet milestones, through the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA).
  Another vaccine that relies on HEK-293, being developed by two companies owned by the billionaire scientist and businessman Patrick Soon-Shiong, made an earlier, Warp Speed long list of 14 promising candidates, according to a press release from one of companies, NantKwest.
  Prentice says: "As they are choosing—BARDA and the Warp Speed people— what vaccines to move ahead, they should at least recognize that there is some portion of the population who would like an alternative vaccine they can take in good conscience."
  Caplan disagrees. "If you are going to say the government shouldn't fund things that a minority of people object to, you will have a very long list of things that won't get funded by the government, from research on weapons of war to contraceptive research."
• The Trump administration has restricted the use of human fetal tissue from elective abortions in biomedical research. One year ago, it  adopted a policy that forbids researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using fetal tissue from elective abortions in their studies. And it imposed an extra layer of review on non-NIH scientists seeking agency funding to do research using such tissue. But the policy did not stop either group from using decades-old fetal cell lines like HEK-293 and PER.C6.

See also

• Abortion debate
• Complicity
• Vaccine misinformation