PBA451H: Vaccines and Fetal Cell Lines

The goal of this seminar:

• Science
  • Understand the basic high-level science of vaccine production
  • The role of fetal cell lines (especially HEK 293 cells
  • COVID-19 vaccines and mRNA
• Ethics
  • Ethical problems
  • Cooperation with Evil / Appropriation of Evil / Ill-gotten Gains
  • Guidance

useful resource?

• https://s27589.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/09.17.20-Fetal-Cell-Line-Fact-Sheet.pdf

How do vaccines work?

(foreshadows mRNA vaccines)

Sidenote: https://xkcd.com/2397/

have clipped a 2m30s section of this video with a good explanation of what cell lines are (but don't play the rest - the ethical analysis is pretty bad) https://www.christiansandthevaccine.com/episodes/intro

HEK 293 cells

Up to “drawbacks” at 5:05:

See: If any drug tested on HEK 293 is immoral goodbye modern medicine

• HCQ (popular among those opposed to COVID vaccines)
• Ibuprofen (Advil)
• Acetamenophen (Tylenol)
• Aspirin
• Pepto-Bismol
• Tums
• … and many other very common medications were also tested on HEK cells

How do we operate in a world where we can't avoid evil entirely?

There are lots of examples of actions that involve cooperation in evil or appropriation of evil that we would not consider to be impermissible, that we would not consider ourselves to be morally responsible for the evil. Based on this list of 12 things that are less remote cooperation than vaccines, the used of fetal cells in vaccines is a serious moral issue, but there are many more serious examples of cooperation in evil, e.g.

1. Buy Energizer Batteries, Heinz Ketchup, Doritos, Lays, or similar
2. Wear Diamonds
3. Eat bananas
4. Use 99% of mobile devices
5. Buy anything made in China
6. Watch Mulan
7. Drink coffee
8. Use Google, Bing, mainstream online search
9. Use Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, American Express or many major insurers
   1. TTC / United Way / Planned Parenthood
10. Pay taxes
11. Pretty much everything involved in alcohol production and distribution
12. Miami and drug trade fuelling economic growth of the city

Pro-lifers all agree that we need ethical alternatives to these tainted cell lines. However, given an understanding of how it is they work, there are two possible answers:

1. Some pro-lifers refuse to use such vaccines. This is an ethical stance, a boycott to pressure companies to stop using them. And people should have the right to refuse vaccines with links to unethical sources. (People should also understand that Tylenol, Advil, Aspirin, etc have made use of the same cell lines.)
   • While boycott is a defensible position for pro-lifers to take, the obligation for all pro-lifers to boycott is not a consistent position to take.
     • Using Facebook, Google, Microsoft products, buying from Starbucks all have far more direct connections to millions of ongoing abortions - Google, Microsoft, Starbucks donate to Planned Parenthood directly¹⁾. Also, Zoom, Netflix, Pepsi, Shell, United Airlines, etc etc. What if your mechanic donates to the local abortion clinic?
     • Nevermind the rest of medicines or processed foods that have connections to HEK cells
     • It's simply an inconsistent position for all but the truly ascetic, and vaccines would be much further down the list than other things (e.g. Starbucks: coffee is less essential than medicine, and Starbucks is connected to thousands of ongoing abortions versus a vaccine that has a distant link to one abortion 50+ years ago - if boycott is an obligation for everyone, we wouldn't start with vaccines)
   • Pro-lifers who boycott vaccines have an additional moral obligation to take extra steps to protect children and their community from disease in place of vaccination
2. Many pro-lifers believe it is morally permissible to use such vaccines, when there are no ethical alternatives available, because the cooperation with evil is remote and there is proportionate reason to do so, while making the objection known and calling for ethical alternatives

Ultimately, this is a matter of prudential judgment, but there are many important things to consider in making this judgment.

(Prudential judgment: A man is convicted of theft and his wife doesn't want him to go to prison, judgment to send him to prison or not (more than one legitimate position).)

In a broken world where it is impossible to be 100% disconnected from evil, pro-lifers and Christians have traditionally turned to the concept of cooperation with evil to determine when it is morally permissible and when it is not — that is, when we are morally responsible for cooperating with evil, and when we are not - when that responsibility belongs to someone else and is not shared by us.

Examples:

• e.g. paying a mechanic who supports abortion
• e.g. driving a friend to an abortion clinic
• e.g. God giving us free will
• e.g. parent giving teenager things that they use for evil

Clearly, simplistic answers don't make sense.

How can we think systematically and consistently about this?

• cooperation with evil, explain the concept

But then, are vaccines really cooperation? How can you cooperate with something that already happened? Can you cooperate with the Holocaust or the British slave trade in 2021?

Maybe cooperation applies to producing a vaccine, but appropriation of evil, or benefitting from ill-gotten gains, is perhaps a better category when it comes to people taking a vaccine

examples

• e.g. Indigenous land
• e.g. Nazi research on hypothermia

Most challenging analogy I've heard: What if the cell lines were derived from Holocaust victims? https://secularprolife.org/2013/05/a-bioethical-question/

ROUGH NOTES based off: https://janetsmith.org/2021/01/30/the-morality-of-covid-vaccines-a-talk-by-professor-janet-e-smith/

• Prudential judgment: A man is convicted of theft and his wife doesn't want him to go to prison, judgment to send him to prison or not (more than one legitimate position)
• Evaluating Any Action
  • Does it violate any absolute moral norm? (e.g. adultery (instrinsically evil) versus going to lunch or working from an office alone etc (prudential judgment))
  • If not…
    • What choice does more good than harm (proportionality - not proportionalism)
      • How to spend my money (e.g. buying books, helping the poor)
    • Does it constitute an occasion of sin?
    • Does it lead others to do wrong? (scandal)
      • e.g. trying to talk to a friend who's a prostitute alone versus with others, in a brothel versus at a coffee shop etc etc
    • Does it assist others in wrongdoing? (cooperation with evil - commonly invoked with COVID vaccines, but probably not the right question)
• Suppose X is morally unproblematic
  • e.g. Suppose there are no moral problems with the development or testing of the vaccines
    • Are they needed?
    • Are they effective?
    • Are they safe?
    • Is the expense justified?
    • How much harm do they do?
    • Do they set undesirable precedents? (e.g. mandatory vaccines / passports, distribution priorities)
    • How are they to be justly distributed? (Who should get them first?)
  • e.g. getting old, do I drive late a night?
• If there is some cooperation or association with evil?
  • What kind of cooperation or association with evil?
  • Even if morally permissible (e.g. if cooperation is remote and benefits proportionate)
    • Same questions as previous slide
  • Will the “tolerated” permission with evil lead to more evil?
    • e.g. people will not seek alternative ways of making vaccines
    • e.g. people will continue to think abortion is a morally acceptable procedure or that it can be sanitized by good coming from it
• Cooperation with Evil ²⁾
• Cooperating Agent
  • Assists an evil doer (primary agent) in an evil action
  • What degree of moral responsibility does the cooperating agent have?
  • Is duress involved? (We should never cooperate with evil unless duress is involved)
  • Is scandal involved?
• Important Terms
  • Formal Cooperation (e.g. another doctor assisting the abortionist)
    • explicit
    • implicit (assisting doctor says “I don't even want to be doing this” yet is right there handing the instruments over)
  • Material cooperation
    • Immediate: No mediation between you and the actions (e.g. nurse handing abortionist the tools, there is only one act of will between you and the abortionist)
    • Mediate: Different other wills involved between what you're doing and the final action (e.g. you sell a contraceptive at the pharmacy, still pretty close, but there are more layers involved)
      • Proximate (closer): just a few steps in between
      • Remote (farther): many steps in between (e.g. selling a building to someone who's running a brothel - could still be wrong to cooperate)
• Duress
  • For the cooperation to be moral it must always involve some measure of duress
  • To some degree the cooperating agent is not fully “free” to refuse cooperation
  • May be physical threats (e.g. bank robber points a gun at you and tells you to drive him to the airport)
  • May be a loss of job or damage to career
  • Gravity of the evil (e.g. clerk in a drugstore with Chatelaine type magazine)
  • Depends, too, on how essential the cooperation is
    • Would it happen anyway? (Would it make one little bit of difference? e.g. refusing to buy a coffee from Starbucks because of the causes they support)
• Material Cooperation
  • From the metaphysical term “matter” which means the “stuff” out of which an act is made - not always physical stuff, can be “stuff” like encouragement, or a reminder
  • Means the cooperating agent provides something helpful to the primary agent for completing the action
  • Can never be intrinsically evil
  • Cooperating agent does not will what the primary agent wills (for that would be formal cooperation) - e.g. buying a coffee from Starbucks because they support abortion
• Meaning of the word “remote”
  • Does not primarily refer to physical distance from the event
  • Does not primarily refer to temporal distance from the event
  • Primarily refers to causal distance from the event
    • Paying taxes that go to pay for abortions
    • Buying goods from corrupt companies (e.g. Chinese companies who treat workers poorly and are linked with government)
• Remote Mediate Cooperation
  • There are several/many acts of the will between what the cooperating agent does and the primary agent does
  • There can be many degrees of remote cooperation, one should not worry much about it (we would otherwise be crippled)
  • Actions that contribute indirectly to the evil action
• Examples of Remote Cooperation with Evil
  • (questionable, but:) God gives us everything and we frequently do evil with what He has given us
  • We pay taxes that go for evil actions
  • Parents provide us with so many things we misuse
  • Bosses pay salaries to evil doers
  • Someone rescues a drowning evil-doer
  • Schneider's article: aborted fetal tissue used in many medical experimentation
• Boycotts
  • Usually group attempts to pressure organization that does evil or cooperates with evil
  • Obligation to participate?
    • Likelihood of success
    • Inconvenience to self
• Reasons to refuse even remote cooperation
  • Refusing will help prevent the action from being done
    • e.g. effective boycott
  • The benefits are not proportionate to the harms
  • The action will be understood as approval of the evil involved, i.e. it will cause scandal (lead others towards evil)
• Vaccines NOT Remote Cooperation with Evil of Abortion that Produced Cell Lines
  • At least in respect to the development of the cell lines and of the vaccines
  • It is not possible to cooperate with something that has already been done (e.g. cooperating with the evil of killing indigenous people to get land)
  • It's just imprecise to use this concept here, it's sloppy
• Relevant Categories
  • Remote cooperation with future similar acts of avil
  • Scandal
  • Complicity
  • Appropriation or benefitting from ill-gotten gains
• Cooperation with future evil/complicity
  • May be cooperation with future use of the same cell lines - and that would be remote cooperation
  • The profits made from vaccine enable the companies to produce more vaccines from tainted cell lines
  • Willingness to use the vaccines suggests approval of the development and production of vaccines
• Scandal
  • Clarify meaning: not a shocking thing that some public figure has done or some “sinful” secret exposed from a person's life
  • Definition: Actions that can reasonably be expected to lead others into sin (telling drinking stories about college days while your kids are in college / me and Jared fighting before he went to kindergarten)
  • A person's “cooperating” or being willing to be associated with evil action gives people the impression that you are involved or at least that you approve (e.g. brothel)
• For Many Pro-Lifers…
  • If you are willing to use the vaccines, how can you convince pharmaceutical companies to stop producing them with the use of tainted cell lines?
• Appropriation or Benefitting from ill-gotten gains
  • We live on land unjustly taken from Native Americans - maybe compensation, scholarship, museum, etc, but we're not cooperating with evil
  • We buy products from countries that don't pay their laborers fair wages
  • We invest in companies that use unfair business practices or support immoral causes
• Solution
  • Speak out strongly against the vaccines
  • Complain to companies that produce them
  • Fund companies that will use only moral means of producing them
  • Don't use them
• Some pro-lifers have said “Any link to the abortion process, even the most remote and implicit, will cast a shadow over the duty to bear unwavering witness to the truth that abortion must utterly be rejected… The ends cannot justify the means. We are living throuh one of the worst genocides known to man…. Now is not the time to yield.”
• But suppose they are safe, effective, and necessary - millions of lives will be saved
  • Parallel instances, analogies with the body
    • Nazi medical research, value data on such things as hypothermia
    • Organ transplants, opt-out
• Appropriation…
  • One did not contribute to the evil that produced the gains
  • It is not possible to return goods to rightful owner or repair damage done
  • Using the goods should not lead others to do evil
• Janet Smith: if safe, effective, reasonable cost, it is moral to use them - particularly for health care professionals and the vulnerable
• It is morally permissible to refuse them to make a statement against abortion
• This must be accompanied by a strong push for production of new cell lines in a moral fashion

Cooperation with evil diagram

12 Things Less remote Cooperation in Evil than Covid Vaccines

summary of the position

• https://eppc.org/news/statement-from-pro-life-catholic-scholars-on-the-moral-acceptability-of-receiving-covid-19-vaccines/

get the illustration of what a cell line is from one of these videos (but only that part) https://www.christiansandthevaccine.com/episodes/intro

Lists of vaccines

• https://lozierinstitute.org/an-ethics-assessment-of-covid-19-vaccine-programs/
• https://cogforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/vaccineListOrigFormat.pdf

integrate insights from this article – it's tracing the actions/intentions not the cell lines that matters morally https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/does-the-origin-of-the-cell-lines-used-to-test-covid19-vaccines-make-any-difference/

And therefore:

HeLa cells taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks (difference in that taking the cells didn't physically harm her–but still an issue of cells obtained in an unethical way) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks