Colm Fitzpatrick
High profile anti-vaccination advocates have hit out at this newspaper after it reported a story stating that priests and theologians said “parents are morally obliged to vaccinate their children”.
Most outrage stemmed from the fact that some vaccines were developed from cell lines descending from aborted foetal tissue
Irish journalist Gemma O’Doherty wrote on Twitter: “Shame from @IrishCathNews attempting to emotionally blackmail Catholics to inject their children with unsafe vaccines which contain tissue from aborted babies. Yet another fake Catholic outlet to boycott.”
Effective
Likewise, former politician and disability rights’ campaigner Kathy Sinnott told The Irish Catholic she was “taken aback by the headline”, noting that the use of aborted foetal cells in the production of vaccines was problematic.
However, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life reaffirmed in 2017 that Catholic parents should vaccinate their children, noting that vaccines are both safe and effective.
Commenting on this issue, Dr Helen Watt of the Catholic think-tank Anscombe Bioethics Centre told this newspaper: “In making these decisions, the grim truth must be faced that some vaccines were created using material from unborn children killed by abortion many years ago.
As the Vatican document Dignitas Personae says, even if danger to children’s health can permit parents to use a vaccine developed using cells of illicit origin, we should all be calling on our health care systems to make alternative vaccines available.”
Read last week’s article on vaccinations here.