More bishops are pleading with their governments to give priority to ethically developed coronavirus vaccines, but many also are telling Catholics that not getting vaccinated is a more serious moral problem than using the problematic vaccines.
Australia is among many governments trying to secure access to a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. It is one of five possible vaccines that are nearing the advanced stage of clinical trials, but it was developed using tissue from a cell line cultivated from the remains of a female fetus voluntarily aborted in the early 1970s.
Promoting the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is unnecessarily divisive, said Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney. In a column in the Catholic Weekly, the archbishop wrote: “I, for one, don’t think it would be unethical to use this vaccine if there is no alternative available.
“To do so would not be to cooperate in any abortion occurring in the past or the future.
“But I am deeply troubled by it.”
But, he said, others “will draw a straight line from the ending of a human life in abortion, through to the cultivation of the cell-line, to the manufacture of this vaccine.”