Aborted fetal cells used in the production of some COVID 19 vaccines

You might have noticed, I’m not arguing anything, I was asking a question.

Okay, I am arguing that using cells that are derivative products of something obtained unethically in the past by other people (but are now contributing to healing not harm) is analogous to using land or wealth that can be traced back to actions that were unethical in the past but are now being used to perform beneficial functions in society today. We can’t change the past. We can make ethical decisions about helping and harming people in the present.

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Good thought, worthy of its own thread under the heading of the transmission / inhertitance of sin. The question is if by “culturing” something, does it becomes morally acceptable or what do we do with regards to atonement. What repartions do we do for the imoralities of our forefathers?

It is interesting to see if people would accept vaccines from cell lines that were derived from voluntary donations with consent/ reimbursement? Should be big business if one were to succeed with that and “own” that cell line.

On the one hand, I can see the sense of, “what is done is done, a sin was committed, but once that is done, and I had nothing to do with the actual sin, is it appropriate for me to benefit from such…”. This almost seems akin to Paul’s argument regarding food sacrificed to idols… There was no question that such idolatry was sinful, but he encourages believers to go to the meat market and eat anything there without matters of conscience.

But on the other hand, the meat itself hadn’t been acquired through immoral means. If it had, and our eating it was either subsidizing, or otherwise financially contributing to the effort, I would feel Differently.

But to my mind there seems a difference between receiving the benefit of an evil that is complete and gone, and my participation in it could in no way conceivably contribute to perpetuating that evil, and participating in an evil in some way that is currently continuing… in other words, if we go and simply receive the benefits of fetal cells now, does that not help in some way confirm those benefits, and thereby in some sense support the continuation of said evil?

You could argue that as Christians in Christ we all benefit from a sinful act of the murder of an innocent person.
@EricMH correctly correctly pointed at the flaw of arguing

as if it would not matter any more because of the numbers of subcultures that the cells had undergone and therefore they are not part of the child any more. The fact is that they still are part of that child if you look at it’s unique genome. I could imagine a whole can of worms arising from that argument with regards to cloning :slight_smile:

The argument about vaccination is usually logically incoherent in many ways. Is it an act of ultimate selfishness, e.g. to be done for the preservation of the self - or as taking the risk of the dangers of vaccination for the protection of the vulnerable. So you could argue if there is a vaccine against a disease that is primarily sexually transmitted, is it ethical to promote such a vaccine, even if it was produced in insect cell lines. That is were vaccination hits the critical questions.

There are a couple of interesting questions raised, as on page 53, is the trend the result of the vaccine in 2007 or the introduction of the iPhone, and what happened to Australian men in 2005/6 and in the world of diagnostics. As Trump once stated, the problem with the case numbers is a consequence of testing :slight_smile:

The best quote is on page 57, : “One thing that I have learned is that belief doesn’t change reality” by Everett Koop. As a Christian Koop could not have got it more wrong, as it is only belief that is capable of changing reality. It is the fundamental belief in the truth that makes us strive for the knowledge we need to make changes to reality in a material way and the belief in the truth of our emotions that makes us change reality by the love we show.

The US space program couldn’t have happened without lethal Nazi experiments on adult human victims.

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