![]() ![]() He appealed for the German-made CureVac to be made available in the UK. He claimed that vaccines had historically used “stem cells and tissues from aborted babies”. In August 2021, DUP MLA, and former health minister, Jim Wells, cited “ethical concerns” regarding the historical development and testing. He made an ethical argument in favour of vaccination, to save further hardship for others. Malcolm Duncan, Pastor of Dundonald Elim Church. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life issued guidance on vaccines in 2005, reaffirmed in 2017, that in the absence of alternatives, Catholics may receive vaccines using historical fetal cell lines in good conscience.Ī Belfast News Letter article reported on a blog post by Rev. Some religious groups and those opposed to abortion have questioned the ethics of making any use of fetal cells in the design or manufacture of vaccines. Religiously conservative think tanks such as the Lozier Institute have expressed their opinion that lab sequenced mRNA vaccines, and specifically the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, do not pose an ethical problem for them, as they are synthetically produced. As Professor Helen Petousis Harris explains to AAP FactCheck, no cells of any kind are part of the final vaccine formulation. After the viruses are grown, they are purified and cell culture material is removed. Writing in Science, Meredith Wadman describes cell cultures as “miniature ‘factories’” in which the virus is propagated. It is common for vaccines to be grown in labs using cultures. It is also important to understand how cells are used. They have been used in both medical research and the production of vaccines including hepatitis A, rubella, chickenpox and rabies. Why can’t other cells be used? Alex Kasprak explains that this cell line was selected because they are “uniquely capable of rapidly multiplying modified adenoviruses.” In other words, this is the quickest way of making a traditional vaccine. They are from decades-old, long over abortions, and researchers do not use fetal cells from the present day. Professor Helen Petousis Harris says the cells used today are “ distant descendants ” of the original cells. Dr Paul Offit, an immunisation expert from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who sits on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisory committee, describes these as “standardized cell lines”. Over the decades that followed, these cells have been cloned and replicated, many times. Alex Kasprak at Snopes has summarised the cell line’s origin story, which began with a Canadian scientist’s research into cancer. The fetus was aborted legally at the time for other reasons, and not for the purposes of vaccine research. These cells originate from a fetus which was aborted in the Netherlands in 1973. However, the MRC-5 cell line was used in the preclinical testing of the AstraZeneca vaccine.ĪstraZeneca did use the HEK 293 cell line to manufacture its vaccine (and Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna in the design of their vaccines). This specific claim has been fact checked by Associated Press, Full Fact, Politifact, Reuters and Snopes and found to be false. In November 2020, it was widely claimed on social media, including this Facebook post with over 160,000 views, that the AstraZeneca vaccine contains MRC-5 cells from lung tissue of a male fetus which was aborted in the 1960s. The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca in collaboration with Oxford University has generated the most debate. ![]() Moderna and BioNtech used software to tell them “what chemicals to put together and in what order”. Damian Garde explains how Chinese scientists, after isolating the virus from patients, posted the genetic sequence for COVID-19 online. Moderna began by designing a gene sequence on a computer. The vaccine is then synthetically produced. As Pfizer explains, mRNA vaccines are made from a DNA template in a lab, rather than the traditional method of being made in cells. For example, Pfizer and Moderna use mRNA technology.Īn mRNA vaccine is a new type of synthetic vaccine. Most of the COVID-19 vaccines in development do not use human cell lines in their production. The Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine was the first to be approved for use in the UK on 2 December 2020.Ĭoncerns have been expressed on social media that COVID-19 vaccines are made from aborted fetuses, and some people object to the vaccines on religious and ethical grounds. Thirteen were in third stage trials, and seven already had limited approval for use. This article was previously updated on 2 February 2021 to explain about the use of MRC-5 and HEK 293 cell lines in the design and testing of some vaccines.īy December 2020, there were 78 COVID-19 vaccines in development. UPDATE: This article was updated on 27 July 2021, in response to a query about whether an mRNA vaccine by CureVac uses fetal cell lines in any stage of its development. ![]()
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