So, I appreciate this author’s general points when it comes to remote cooperation with evil; the impossibility and foolishness of trying to hunt down every possible way in which the things we interact with daily are connected to such and such evil, etc. I agree with this.
However, I believe he misses – or maybe just chooses not to explore – something which I believe would be a substantive distinction when it comes to the medicines he mentions. He says that each of these common medicines has been tested with HEK-293, but that’s all he says about them. He doesn’t get into whether or not the development of these medicines was predicated upon testing using HEK-293, or of aborted fetuses in general.
For example, at the top of his list is Tylenol. Great. I have no reason to doubt that Tylenol has been tested with HEK-293. But a simple examination of dates tells me that Tylenol was being sold in the US decades before HEK-293 was a thing. Similarly, ibuprofen began being marketed and sold throughout the UK in 1969, which pre-dated HEK-293. From what little I know about ibuprofen’s clinical testing origins, my understanding is that it focused on trials in living, breathing rheumatoid arthritis patients.
I can’t speak to each and every case of all the medicines on his list, but my point is that he makes no distinction between HEK-293 testing that was conducted incidentally after a drug had become mainstream, versus HEK-293 testing that was used as the very foundation for a particular field of drug development. I believe this distinction is critical, and is where I find my beef with the state of modern vaccine development.
The current status quo among our medical industry – enabled by ourselves, and by our “health authorities” – is that we have no issue with predicating vaccine development upon the use of the flesh of the unborn. Not just HEK-293, but fetal tissue that is still being harvested for research to this day. We have made ourselves content to allow the work of vaccination development to rest upon the bedrock of a godless view of the womb, and of human life. We are complete atheists in our view of medicine. And yet we have the audacity – as Christians – to herald the COVID vaccine as some sort of savior. Have we forgotten that barely a year ago, there were men among us who were willing to speak plainly of COVID as being God’s discipline? I don’t think we are finished learning all the lessons that God has for us here.