Use of Vaccines derived from cells of Aborted Babies

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Puritan Sailor

Puritan Sailor

Puritan Board Doctor
Recently, I discovered that some common vaccines were developed through the use of tissue harvested from electively aborted babies. The babies were not aborted for the purpose of harvesting the tissue but for the convenience of the mother at the time. The scientists harvested the tissue after the fact. Basically, some lung cells were harvested (about 30 years ago) from the fetus and these cells continue to be multiplied and used even today as a culture through which weak viruses are produced and then are extracted and used as vaccines.

Here is an article about it on National Right to Life. http://www.rtl.org/prolife_issues/LifeNotes/VaccinesAbortion_FetalTissue.html

I was surprised first of all that I had not heard of this practice before. Many of these vaccines I and my children have already received over the years. So the question, is it lawful to use such medical technology despite the sinful origins in which the culture was obtained? OR should we refrain from those particular vaccines?

Do you know of any Reformed authors who have written about this ethical question? (Please provide references if you do)

** Disclaimer: If you already reject any vaccine use at all, then please do not respond to this thread. I already know what your answer will be. This is a discussion for those who accept the practice of vaccination in general. Thank you!
 
Patrick,

This is what one Reformed doctor has to say on this issue:

A second argument is that parents are concerned because they have heard that vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue. This is simply not true. What is true is that vaccines are produced by growing viruses and bacteria in cells. The viruses and bacteria are then used in some way (either live, weakened, or just a part of it) in the vaccine. Some viruses are so specific they need to be grown in human cells; they cannot be made in animal cells. Some of those human cell lines in use today came from fetuses that were aborted 35 years ago. While this fact may grab your attention, it is not a reason to avoid vaccines. The use of these vaccines does not support the abortion industry. Federal law prohibits the sale of newly aborted fetuses or their use in medical research; therefore, by using a vaccine, you are not encouraging or promoting abortion.
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The entire article can be found here.
 
As a research scientist, I have faced the issue of using cell lines that were originally derived from fetal tissue. For myself, I believe it is morally acceptable to use them. Although there was a sinful origin to the cell line, the cell lines themselves are obtained from commercial vendors. There are many other human goods that are commonly used that can be traced back to sinful origins. As another example from the medical field, some drugs that have been used in chemotherapy trace their origins back to programs in chemical warfare during the World Wars. The intent then was to take lives. However, the compounds developed during that time were later repurposed as chemotherapeutic compounds. In other words, a sinful origin does not preclude proper use at a later point.
 
The Catholics do a good job on bioethics and have written extended pieces on this issue, do you want me to link you the Vatican's statement?
 
Pergamum said:
The Catholics do a good job on bioethics and have written extended pieces on this issue, do you want me to link you the Vatican's statement?
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I'm aware of the Catholic position already. I'm just curious if the Reformed world added anything new to the discussion.
 
There are charts out there if you go google hunting about which vaccs are not made with human cells if it bothers you. Some still from Japan available. Up until the 1980s vaccs were grown in animal cells.

I am not anti vaccine in principle and my 5 kids got them, however, there is some good research available that when we starting using human tissue in the 80s, (and it is impossible to get all traces of human material out of vaccinations, they contain some human cellular contamination), that is when certain problems increased remarkably because of normal body responses to foreign human tissue. Some babies turned on their own brains in addition to rejecting the human vaccine materials.

I realize people my age got some monkey tissue for example, but the researchers against the modern vaccs say that at least animal tissues do not set up an auto immune response against your own body. (they may have had cancer causing monkey viruses but most of us are still kicking). So the morality of the human cell lines is one issue, but the question of injecting human material into a baby is another subject altogether. If possible I would get any older vaccine still available instead of the human grown ones. Disclaimer- I am not a medical professional.
 
 
Free Christian said:
Morally acceptable!? You can put as much make up on a pig as you like, even a wig and a tutu, its still a pig.
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You clearly don't think so. Why not?

As stated above:

The use of these vaccines does not support the abortion industry. Federal law prohibits the sale of newly aborted fetuses or their use in medical research; therefore, by using a vaccine, you are not encouraging or promoting abortion.
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This applies to the cell lines used to make them - by using them one in no way supports the abortion industry. The cell lines are purchased through a commercial vendor. Nor does using them place a stamp of approval on the way they are obtained.
 
The rise in Autism could be related to the use of viruses pulled from human cells. I'm not a scientist, so I don't know this could be verified, but the timing at least is telling.
 
For what it's worth, I agree with Matt's assessment. However...

lynnie said:
There are charts out there if you go google hunting about which vaccs are not made with human cells if it bothers you.
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Indeed. Here's one for parents; some of the vaccines do not have a non-fetal line equivalent, but I'm not sure if it's up-to-date, being from 2010. Here's a chart with more or less the same information, but organized around the CDC vaccine schedule and optimized for pediatricians.
 
Warren said:
The rise in Autism could be related to the use of viruses pulled from human cells. I'm not a scientist, so I don't know this could be verified, but the timing at least is telling.
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A couple things. One, the publisher of that journal is on Beall's list of possible predatory publishers. That doesn't disprove any of the claims within the journal, but it does make them suspect.

Two, the article relies primarily on linear regressions, so I found a blog post about it by a statistics professor at Cornell named W.M. Briggs. He concludes that, while "there is overwhelming evidence that [the author of the study] is highly intelligent and believes what she is saying," he states that, "I find the paper poor in conception, argument, and quality, and regard her main contention as unproved." Briggs identifies several specific problems with the regression analysis, but let me quote the those that I think are most glaring from another math blog (which discusses a different study on the same topic by the same authors with the same general problems):

  • They’re applying it to a dataset that is orders of magnitude too small to be able to generate a meaningful result for a single slope change, but they use it to identify three different slope changes.
  • They use mixed datasets that measure different things in different ways, without any sort of meta-analysis to reconcile them.
  • When one of their datasets shows a decrease in the slope, but another shows an increase, they arbitrarily choose the one that shows an increase.
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Back to Briggs. The studies concern a purported rise in autism, but as Briggs points out, that in and of itself is spurious:

Long ago, before autism was well understood, it was, of course, not well diagnosed, so that even if records were immaculate, which they were not, we would not have had a good idea of the actual rate of autism. The increasing centralization of medicine, in teaching, practice, literature, and regulation, undoubtedly contributed to an increase in the diagnosis rate of autism (the reader understands I mean the disease in its various forms; we’ll tighten this later). Indeed, a steady increase in autism diagnoses has been observed.

And then the disease hit public awareness. And then the disease underwent a broadening in definition, especially in the hugely influential Diagnosis and Statistical Manual and its revisions. And then western society increasingly decided that being and acting male was a disease. And then the media was flooded with “Ask your doctor if Profitozol is right for you” articles and ads. And then the Internet hit and facilitated self-diagnoses. And then some wacky celebrities decided vaccines must be causing autism.

The diagnosis rate increased, surely in part because of all these things. But the diagnosis rate could also have increased because something new was causing new cases of autism. How to separate the increase in diagnosis rate from (let us call them) “awareness” factors and actual disease causes? Some thing or things caused each diagnosis, and some thing or things caused each true case of autism. The two sets of causes are different (a doctor identifying a wound is not the wound). Or has the disease definition been expanded so much that even marginal cases are being accurately identified as autism: understand that I mean here accurate diagnoses but for an “autism” that is not be the same “autism” of two decades ago; e.g. every time a boy acts like a boy is now some form of “autism” (or “Aspergers” or whatever).
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Indeed, it seems that the "awareness" factors Briggs refers to are the primary cause of the increase in autism diagnosis rates, according to various recent studies:

Considering the numbers, it’s reasonable to ask: What’s causing the rise in cases.

Now researchers believe they know: Almost certainly, nothing. Most of the rise in autism is a statistical mirage.

...

So what does the latest evidence show? There now is intriguing evidence that there in fact has been no dramatic rise in autism after all. ... The exact same thing has happened in every country that has seen soaring autism rates–the definition of what constitutes autism was dramatically expanded in the early 1990s to embrace the catch-all term Autism Spectrum Disorder–correlating with when GMO usage, chemtrail rates, pesticide exposure and organic food sales began a sharp increase.

The researchers discovered that the change in diagnostic criteria taken together along with the diagnoses made outside of a healthcare facility accounted for as much as 60 percent of the increase in prevalence of autism spectrum disorders.
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In closing, whatever you decide about vaccines from fetal cell lines, please do vaccinate your children:

The threat of death by disease isn't the only medical consequence of skipping vaccinations. An unvaccinated child faces lifelong differences that could potentially put him or her at risk. Every time you call 911, ride in an ambulance, go to the doctor or visit the hospital emergency room, you must alert medical personnel of your child's vaccination status so he or she receives distinctive treatment. Because unvaccinated children can require treatment that is out of the ordinary, medical staff may be less familiar, and less experienced, with the procedures required to appropriately treat your child.

Women who are pregnant but not vaccinated can be vulnerable to diseases that may complicate their pregnancy. A pregnant woman who contracts rubella in the first trimester may have a baby with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS), which can cause heart defects, developmental delays and deafness.

People who choose not to vaccinate their children also put others at risk if their child isn't vaccinated and becomes ill. Special groups of people cannot be vaccinated, including those with compromised immune systems (e.g. those with leukemia or other cancers). These people rely on the general public being vaccinated so their risk of exposure is reduced.
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Warren said:
The rise in Autism could be related to the use of viruses pulled from human cells. I'm not a scientist, so I don't know this could be verified, but the timing at least is telling.
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In addition to being a no-name journal, there is a clear conflict of interest in that the researchers belong to an institute that seems to be chasing a hypothesis.

Regarding the supposed connection between vaccines and autism, here is another quote from the above article:

A third argument used against vaccination revolves around whether or not they are safe. Questions are asked, “Didn’t you hear that they cause autism,” and, “Shouldn’t we keep those things out of our bodies?” Regarding the autism question, the short answer is vaccines definitively do not cause autism. In 1998 there was a single study published in the British journal, The Lancet, that purported a link between the two. A thorough and careful reading of the study showed shoddy scientific technique and data manipulation that resulted in retraction of the article. Furthermore, the head doctor lost his medical license. Many high quality studies have since dispelled both causation and correlation between vaccinations and autism.
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Here is a link to the article from the New England Journal of Medicine, which is one of the most widely respected journals in medical research.
 
Hi Matt. Because i am Christian. Big dif between a chemical and a living being. Hows that similar? When do you think Jesus was Jesus in Mary?
 
Free Christian said:
When do you think Jesus was Jesus in Mary?
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It seems clear to me that Matt affirms the full personhood of children in the womb, given that he said of the vaccines in question, "There is a sinful origin to the cell line."

Big dif between a chemical and a living being. Hows that similar?
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You seem here to be referencing this portion of Matt's earlier post:

mgkortus said:
As another example from the medical field, some drugs that have been used in chemotherapy trace their origins back to programs in chemical warfare during the World Wars. The intent then was to take lives. However, the compounds developed during that time were later repurposed as chemotherapeutic compounds.
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If so, I think you're missing Matt's point. Here's the equivalence:

1. Some chemotherapy drugs have their origin in chemical compounds that were designed for taking lives. Similarly, some vaccines have their origin in viruses that were harvested from people who were killed unjustly.
2. In neither case was anyone killed for the express purpose of developing the treatment that was later developed (the parents did not abort their children with any awareness that the tissue would be used for medical research).
3. Chemotherapy treatments are not now being advanced by chemical warfare, nor are any vaccines being advanced by present or future abortions (it's now illegal to use aborted fetal tissue for that purpose, at least in the United States).

It's also important to note again that the vaccines contain no human tissue whatsoever, nor is any fetal tissue currently being used. The cells which originated the cell line have long since died. (Matt and anyone else, correct me if I say anything incorrect.)
 
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