Some people do have genuine concerns about vaccination one of which I will address in this article. The full version of this article includes biblical arguments and can be on my Patheos blog or you you can download a PDF version for printing. What follows is an abridged “taster”

On social media there are a lot of myths about these vaccines, many of which fall into the category of untruths. One of these are about the ingredients of the vaccines. 

Ingredients of COVID-19 vaccines

Some are claiming that if you inject the COVID-19 vaccine into you then you are injecting aborted babies. There are even videos and links circulating on social media that claim to show ingredients of the vaccines and that one of them is fetal tissue. Some of these reports are falsified. The idea that the vaccines contain as an ingredient aborted body parts of babies is simply and completely untrue.

You can confirm the ingredients for yourself by looking at sections 2 and 6.1 of the following UK official documents for the three vaccines being rolled out: Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra-Zeneca. Note that none of the ingredients listed in 6.1 are made from aborted baby parts. In the case of Astra-Zeneca there is a note in section 2 that HEK293 cells are involved in the manufacture of the vaccine itself, and more of that later in the article. But even that does not mean that those cells are contained in the actual vaccine.

No babies were aborted in order to make COVID-19 vaccines

Vaccination is not just an act of self preservation. It is an act of love towards our neighbours to do them good. Vaccination is a life or death issue . Even if you believe that you yourself are not in a high risk group for death, others around you are. Like many readers of this site I am one such person since my blood cancer and its treatment has severely damaged my immune system so that I cannot make sufficient antibodies to fight off infection or in response to a vaccine.  If you take a vaccine you might save my life by not giving me COVID-19.

Some people do not reject the concept of vaccination altogether but instead reject certain vaccines for a more specific reason that we will now turn to.

What are human cell lines?

Scientifically it is crucial for a number of stages in research, development, testing, and in some cases even the manufacture of certain types of vaccine for human-like cells to be used.

Historically it was actually very difficult to get human cells to grow in a laboratory setting, in effect to be immortal, or to keep multiplying for decades.  Many attempts were made to genetically engineer human cells to change them so that they can be reliably grown and used for all sorts of experiments.

Two main sources of the human cells they attempted to transform in this way were cancer cells (which obviously behave in a not fully human way), and human embryos. Importantly this is not the same as embryo research as the idea was not to grow human embryos in a lab but rather to create a sample of cell tissue that could be grown in a laboratory for decades and used in research.

Because it has been so hard to produce such cell lines historically there are relatively few efforts today to recreate similar cell lines to those which have worked well for decades.  Science flourishes on predictability and when thousands of experiments have been done using the same cells it makes a lot of sense to keep using them. It will be hard to persuade scientists to re-create cell lines that work and are the foundation for so many medical developments. This is unfortunate because in theory it would be possible to attempt to create new cell lines from entirely ethical sources such as umbilical chord stem cells.

The cell lines used today were created a long time ago

One of the most widespread cell lines used in one way or another with almost all medical developments whether they be vaccines or medicines is a cell line called  HEK293 or FreeStyle293F.

This cell line has been used at least in the development or testing phase of almost all COVID-19 vaccines. Here is a summary of how the various vaccines have used these cells.

• The COVID-19 spike protein gene was grafted into HEK293 cells allowing them to produce copies of this protein allowing it to be further studied.  The knowledge led directly to vaccine development and these cell lines were used in developing and testing all the vaccines.
• The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do not use the HEK293 cells as part of their production process
• In the case of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine as noted in their official information, HEK293 cells are used to grow the vector virus that is inactivated and ultimately becomes the vaccine.  Thus the cells are not in the vaccine but are part of the production process.

Some people make a moral distinction between those vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) where the testing or development requires HEK293 and those where the manufacture process requires them.Since the cell lines are used in both cases to me it seems like splitting hairs or straining at gnats to make such a distinction. The moral equivalence of both types of vaccine is well argued with references to scientific papers outlining the use of HEK293 cell lines in COVID vaccines by Stacy Trasancos.

The professor who made the original HEK293 cell line, from which all the cells used today are directly descended, cannot remember where this originating embryo came from. The reason the cell line is called 293 is because that was his 293rd experiment. Some of these experiments apparently used cells from miscarriages and some from abortions. Crucially the decision to carry out the abortion (if indeed HEK293 came from an abortion) was entirely separate from the decision to attempt to make a tissue culture out of the cells.

Abortions were not carried out in order to create cell lines.  Cell tissues were created via genetic engineering after the abortion had occurred. 

In order to make the cells essentially immortal genetic engineering was involved, and so the resultant cell culture line is no longer a pure human tissue. Use of the cell line is not considered embryo research.  The cells could never grow to become a human being.

Because these cells are so predictable and amenable to further genetic alterations they have been used in huge numbers of experiments. A recent moral report on vaccines explains the impact of these cells:

“58,094 scientific papers have already been published that are associated with HEK293 alone—and they were instrumental in the development of numerous drugs and medical treatments. For example, HEK293 cells were used to study the human dopamine receptor, and many of the antipsychotic drugs used to treat mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder would not have been discovered without them” Read More

The scientific knowledge that has come about through the use of these cells is therefore everywhere. It would be almost impossible to  avoid taking any vaccine or medicine that had been tested on this cell line, or whose development was contributed to by knowledge obtained from using them.

We all benefit from an abortion which happened decades ago in which we had no part.

We cannot go back into history and undo the creation of HEK293 or its adoption as perhaps the best understood and standardised tissue culture in use in science.  It is important to stress that now this cell line exists it is not necessary for other abortions to be undertaken to create such cell lines.

Some people are opposed to ongoing embryonic research. And in response to ethical objections a ban was instituted in the USA by the Trump administration. It is interesting to note that the ongoing use of tissue like HEK293 was specifically excluded from that ban. This is due to the fact that the tissue has been around for so long, and the fact that the modifications to the tissue mean that it should not be considered fully human.

I explore the Biblical arguments fully in favour of accepting these vaccines despite their tenuous link to abortion in the full version of this article. But it is not inconsistent to still take life saving vaccines that used these cell lines in order to rescue society from all the effects of the pandemic (the good effect) and yet believe the the initial abortion was wrong (the bad effect). The vaccines have now been made, and we have no alternative course of action if we want to get COVID-19 under control than to take them. This does not need to imply we agree with that long-ago act.

This obviously touches on the whole notion of corporate guilt. Do I become guilty by association or by my own action? Is there a moral difference between the researchers using the product of an abortion and those involved in the abortion itself,  the decision for which was taken separately? Do I really share any guilt by taking the vaccine at such a removed distance?

Roman Catholic theologians typically take a firm anti-abortion stance. But their theologians agree that the remoteness of the link makes this morally acceptable. The National Catholic Bioethics Center explains:

“Any product grown in these or other cell lines derived from abortions, therefore, has a distant association with abortion. The cells in these lines have gone through multiple divisions before they are used in vaccine manufacture. After manufacture, the vaccines are removed from the cell lines and purified. One cannot accurately say that the vaccines contain any of the cells from the original abortion.”

Joe Carter makes a similar argument about separating the consequences of a morally questionable action from the action itself, using the question of whether organ transplant from a murder victim would be acceptable:

If a doctor were to offer to transplant a kidney or heart from the murder victim into a Christian, we would likely not object . . . no one would say the Christian who received the organ was morally responsible in any way for the murder. Read More

God turns events that are morally wrong around to save the lives of others.  Let’s go right to the heart of the Christian message. The gospel tells us that the death and resurrection of Jesus has obtained for us not a temporary saving of our earthly lives from a virus, but an eternal salvation of our souls from sin. Yet that very salvation simply could not have happened without the sin of those who betrayed Jesus and murdered  him on the Cross. Jesus was sinned against, and yet also “gave himself for our sins to deliver us” (Galatians 1:4).

Without the greatest sin of all time, we could never have been saved.

We live in an imperfect world, and the possible implication that we are approving of in some way a long-time ago moral act is surely vastly outweighed by the huge moral good in terms of lives saved and economic ruin reversed that accompany taking the vaccine.

We have two choices: we can take the vaccine accepting all that we know about them and hopefully save lives, protect others, and help end the pandemic.  Or we can refuse the vaccine, and put ourselves and family at ongoing risk of this deadly disease and by our refusal to take the vaccine possibly contribute to a state of affairs where insufficient people take the vaccine and the COVID-19 pandemic is not eradicated.

Not taking the vaccine has the potential to do far more harm, and to cost many lives

At the beginning of 2021 is there a better practical way to bring physical healing to this World than to fully play our part in banishing COVID-19 by being vaccinated, encouraging our friends and family to be vaccinated, countering the lies that many are spreading, and campaigning for the vaccine to be made available to every nation in the World?

Without vaccinating the entire World’s population we risk new variants of the virus arising and further waves of misery. Since Western countries are better equipped in many cases to track the emergence of any unexpected side effects, and confirm efficacy in the real world, I understand that it is good that their millions are the first being vaccinated.  But we must not hoard the vaccine but rather share it with the developing world.  To that end the actions of the Oxford and Astra-Zeneca group in licensing a manufacturer in India to produce huge quantities of their vaccine at a further reduced price for the developing world is surely to be welcomed.

Justice demands that we offer these life saving COVID-19 vaccines to everyone in the World. Love for our neighbours urges us all to take it.