“This is something you can do !”, my mother said to me as the concluding remark to her exhortation to “get the jab” as my father put it. In a complex world of unforeseen and unforeseeable dangers, we should exercise prudential caution and take those steps which are in our power to take and let go of those things beyond our control and against which we can’t protect ourselves.
I took my mother’s point, but there’s more to the story than mere medicine. The jab we’re talking about are the mRNA- or DNA-based vaccines to curb the dangers of the Wuhan ‘flu’ (the single quote are not cynical scare quotes, but represent omitted letters). I don’t call it ‘Covid-19’ or ‘Coronavirus’. I don’t work in a virology lab and if I did I wouldn’t refer to the virus in public by whatever was on the label by a Petri dish. I don’t work as an epidemiologist in a clinic where a team might internally refer to the virus as a corona virus. “Spanish ‘Flu'” was apt for the generation that dealt with it, and I don’t think they could or should be accused of harbouring anti-Spanish sentiment in ear-marking the origin of its location. The only groups I might annoy with my common Wu’flu’ nomenclature are perhaps the World Health Organisation, vicariously-sensitive P.C. liberals or the Chinese Communist Party. For the sake of consistency and continuity with Zika, German measles, and many other sanely-named viruses, I’ll just have to take the risk.
I’m reluctant to take the vaccines (at least those available in Ireland – Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna, Atra-Zeneca, and Jahnsen) simply because of the bio-ethical issues involved. More specifically, it’s the tissues involved. Fetal tissues. As with a lot of connections to the grisly underworld of how medicine is done these days, the facts around the matter are hard to come by and often completely suppressed, as we saw recently, when Pfizer recently fired Melissa Strickler for leaking emails of senior executives suppressing the connection of the testing of the Pfizer vaccine against the 40-year-old fetal stem cell line HEK-293. The testing of the Moderna vaccine has a similar connection, while the other vaccines mentioned above have a stronger dependency on fetal cell lines in development and/or production. Again, HEK-293 sounds like another abstractly clinic cover-word. I was shocked to find out that HEK stands for Human Embryonic Kidney. No wonder it’s an acronym. Apparently, that kidney cell line was ‘harvested’ from a live baby (one of many because 293 refers to the number of ‘experiments’ – here I am using scare quotes), delivered by C-section before being murdered for medical science. In the Netherlands, ground zero for plummeting value of human life in its vulnerable stages. Those little babies didn’t give consent for their bodies to be used for medical science, much less to be killed for it. What happened to them is a double undermining of human dignity.
Now, there have been several analyses (one such analysis of advice from Catholic clergy is here) of the moral ethics around availing of vaccines (or any other medicines for that matter) that rely on HEK-293. A comprehensive review of the moral positions of conscience given the background of directions published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was done by Dualta Roughneen here. A reasonable starting point is to admit that there’s no sense in which we are cooperating with what happened in the Netherlands 40 years ago. You can’t cooperate with a fait-accompli. The issue I see, is the tacit endorsement of that way of doing medicine with the widespread acceptance of these vaccines. Apparently, there are other medicines which are tested against these cell lines, and I for one would not have become aware of these dependencies (are they necessary dependencies ?) if these issues of conscience around the Wuhan ‘flu’ vaccines had not been brought up. And nobody is asking me whether I took ‘Advil’ for pain relief recently (which is, according to some sources, reliant on testing with HEK-293) so there’s no consciousness-raising value to refusing a tablet like that (although we should push back there too). However, there is a lot of pressure coming from family, friends, medical practitioners to get the jab. There’s a lot of pressure for everybody to get 100% vaccinated. And that’s the time for a cohort of us who can and should say ‘No’, to do so. Try again. Without the fetal stem cell lines. There are some of us (elderly, immo-compromised, etc.) who can’t reasonably be asked to do this. If the vaccines are really effective (and that is still an ‘if’ to my mind), then it would not make much sense to add another likely death to the deaths of babies from whom the cell lines were taken. But there is a cohort of us in a low-risk category for whom mRNA vaccines apparently provide extra immunity to a not-particularly fatal disease. Our opposition to the culture of death may be bought out, but hopefully not that cheaply.
Most of us won’t be able to resist, in our everyday lives, the culture of death which treats human beings as either experimental tissue or garbage. But there is a medically low-risk cohort of us who are being bothered by others to get jabbed, and getting hassled enough to be in a position to raise awareness about this grisly aspect to the vaccine industry. If we resist, the manufacturers will think twice about generating a new cell line like this, if the original ones become deteriorated. If we don’t resist at all, they’ll just barge ahead, and assume because nobody said anything or refused anything, the market place gave them a green light for such activity. It is an irony of this age of information that some of it, which is of pressing ethical salience, is suppressed. That’s why we should consult sources like the Lozier Institute who have put together a comprehensive review of the ties of Wuhan virus vaccines to fetal stem cells. We should make our choices with the most comprehensive information and context we can get. Those of us who can so so, should send the message to big pharma and big governments.
“This is something you can do”, after all.
Phyos 