While this is a fine question to ask, I have long contended that it doesn’t go far enough. While it’s good to question the use of fetal cell tissue in the production of vaccines, what people should be considering is the use of fetal cell tissue in the research of vaccines, in general. Even if a particular vaccine isn’t manufactured in direct connection to aborted fetal cell lining, you can’t ignore the trail of dead children that have been used in research. The rubella vaccine, alone, involved the use of tissue from over 70 aborted fetuses. Not to mention experiments on orphans and mentally-handicapped people.
And yet many Christians seem to go no further than asking whether the end result vaccine they put in their bodies involves direct descendancy from the MRC-5 cell line, or something similar. We aren’t going far enough.
The ends do not justify the means. I don’t believe Christians are nearly concerned enough about these things.
Here is the blog I believe you are referring to. I may be wrong.
Here was the reply I left for Pastor Wilson in the comments. I doubt he ever read it, but I ruffled some feathers in the comments section.
"Pastor Wilson, thank you for this helpful article, and for the opportunity to interact a bit. I have a few thoughts.
First, I’d like to simply and non-controversially affirm that we should fear God more than we fear rubella. In the interest of erring on the side of caution, and in viewing our lives through an eternal lens, we ought to fear the one who has the power to kill not only the body (e.g. rubella), but also the soul in hell. While I understand the nuance of the discussion, and all this talk of secondary, tertiary, quaternary culpability, etc., I guess I’d just want to exhort Christians to have a bit of faith-empowered backbone at the end of the day. Yes, measles and rubella are really bad, and I don’t desire them to fall upon any household. But if we would behave and think like Christians, will we not affirm that it is better to suffer rubella for doing good than to be complicit in sin (1 Peter 3:17)?
Second, I appreciate your thoughts about how we cannot “unknow” the knowledge that has been gained through the heinous things man has done in history. You mentioned tests conducted by the Nazis, and I was also reminded of Japan’s Unit 731, and how the United States gave immunity to some of the camp’s workers in exchange for information about the findings of their experiments. Your comments really helped me process that. I especially appreciated your conclusion, “…while the knowledge of a particular truth is itself uncorrupted, you want to make sure that you never use such knowledge in a way that incentivizes researchers to go get more of it in that way.”
The only problem I see with this conclusion – as it relates to the subject matter at hand – is that I am skeptical that vaccine research actually can be seperated from the corrupt nature of their development. Something that is very crucial to keep in view here is that while we may only be discussing a handful of specific vaccines that were manufactured using aborted fetal cells, there have been hundreds if not thousands of aborted fetal organs used in the research and development of other vaccines. Researchers like Stanley Plotkins have been plainly vocal on this fact. Admittedly, I am not knowledgeable enough to know why these scientists choose aborted fetal cultures as their preferred test subjects. Perhaps it has to do with the controlled nature and “purity” of the specimens, as opposed to using an adult cadaver. Perhaps it has to do with being unable to duplicate variables in animal flesh. I’m not sure. But it would appear to me that it could almost be said that vaccine research is virtually predicated on the use of aborted fetal remains. And if that’s the case, then I think we ought to conclude that the whole of the effort needs to be rejected. Not just these two vaccines in question.
The last thing I’d want to discuss – and I’ll just make passing mention of it, and let you decide if it’s something you’d be willing to explore further in another post – has to do with whether or not it is just for the civil magistrate to force its citizens to receive vaccines to begin with. In your article, if I am following your Russian roulette analogy, you seem to have painted the person who doesn’t vaccinate to be the person playing Russian roulette. However, I would argue that both the vaxxer and the non-vaxxer are both playing Russian roulette. The chamber allocations just happen to vary depending on your circumstances. For example, in the United States, in the year 2019, you are more likely to die from a measles vaccine than you are to contract measles to begin with. Setting aside the reason for those statistics (which are disputed within the pro-vax/anti-vax debate), these are simply the numbers. This means that parents – whose primary charge is the safety and well-being of their own children – may reasonably conclude that it may be in the best interest of their child not to vaccinate.
Notice, I am being deliberate when I say their child. I am not talking about society as a whole. I understand that the counter-argument to this will always be “herd immunity.” I get it. And I understand what you mean about it being in the civil authority’s interest to have an inoculated populace. The government cares about the forest, not the trees. But I question whether or not Christians should be so quick to accept the civil magistrate’s mandate that they vaccinate their children. I would contend that this is merely another front being opened up on secularism’s war against the family and the authority of parents.
“All things being equal,” I believe that parents will generally always act in what they believe to be for the best interest of their children. Jesus affirms that we, though being evil, still know how to give good gifts to our children. Most parents are not dead-beat parents. I would far rather trust parents, in any given generation and society, to weigh the risks of making informed choices about their children’s health risks, than cede control to the state to tell us what we must inject into our children. And that has implications that reach much further than vaccines."
