The Vatican released on Monday a note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved by Pope Francis, giving the green light during the pandemic to the use of COVID-19 vaccines produced with cell lines derived from two fetuses aborted in the 1960s. In November, it was widely claimed on social media that the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine contains MRC-5 cells composed of fibroblasts originally developed from lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted Caucasian male fetus in the 1960s. The fact-checking also concluded that no COVID-19 vaccine contains cells from aborted fetuses, and that while a replica cell line from a fetus aborted in 1973 was used to develop the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, the vaccine itself does not contain fetal cells. New messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccines, such as those being developed by Pfizer and Moderna, are described as synthetic vaccines, sequenced on a computer in a lab, that do not use fetal cell lines in their production. The CDF says it does not “intend to judge the safety and efficacy” of COVID-19 vaccines, which it said is the responsibility of biomedical researchers and drug agencies, but focuses on “the moral aspects of receiving vaccines developed using cell lines from tissue obtained from two fetuses aborted in the 1960s”.

Source: Philippine Star December 23, 2020 11:03 UTC