National Catholic Register

Volume 77 No. 41  October 14 – 20, 2001

A Better Way:  Campaign for Clean Vaccines Gathers Steam

by Celeste McGovern, Register Correspondent

CLEARWATER, Fla. – First, Debi Vinnedge was shocked when she learned many routine vaccines are developed using cells from aborted babies.  Then she was furious.

The executive director of the Clearwater-based Children of God for Life started to pray. “Lord, I can’t do this,” she remembers praying. “How can one person fight the pharmaceutical industry?  It’s too big!”  Then I heard a quiet voice inside say, “It’s not too big for God.”  Vinnedge became determined.

That was in 1999.  Today she has amassed nearly 430,000 signatures in a petition urging pharmaceutical companies to provide alternative vaccines that are grown without using fetal tissue. Her campaign has the support of groups ranging from the Catholic Medical Association and American Life League to Human Life International.  She has linked up with the Orlando based group, Liberty Counsel that offers to defend parents against state authorities free of charge, to preserve their rights to refuse vaccination on religious grounds.

Most encouraging for parents who want to vaccinate their children but feel uncomfortable with the dark past of the available ones, Vinnedge is also making headway with the Food and Drug Administration.  One goal: to gain federal approval to have a Japanese-developed “untainted” alternative to the fetal tissue-tainted rubella vaccine imported and distributed in the United States.

Even with her campaign snowballing, most Catholic parents are unaware that several common vaccines – measles, mumps and rubella (the MMR shot), polio, chickenpox, rabies and hepatitis-A – involve the use of aborted babies.

The production of these vaccines involves a stage where a virus is grown on a cell culture.  In the cases of commonly used vaccines for these diseases, the viruses are grown on cell lines from two aborted fetuses. One of these cell lines, WI-38, was developed at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1961 from the lung tissue of a female fetus, aborted at three months gestation because her parents felt they had too many children.

The other, MRC-5 was taken from the lung tissue of a normal 14-week, male baby, aborted for “psychiatric reasons”, according to a 1970 article in the journal, Nature.

The rubella vaccine, present in the MMR shot developed by Merck & Co., has a particularly troubling history, triply tied to abortion.  Besides being grown on WI-38, the virus itself was taken from the kidneys of a baby aborted in 1964 during a rubella epidemic, when many doctors encouraged women to abort rather than risk having babies born with Congenital Rubella Syndrome, a disease associated with many malformations.

Suzanne Rini, in her book Beyond Abortion, describes who the MMR was also tested on “to be aborted women.”  That is, pregnant women who were planning abortions were given the rubella vaccine and asked to delay their abortions for three to four weeks, so scientists could examine the result on the fetuses.  As well, at least one women in the control group who received the MMR did not realize she was pregnant and miscarried as a result, it is thought, of the vaccine.  It was these experiments that led scientists to advise pregnant women against receiving the vaccine because it harms unborn babies.

St. Louis Controversy

Vinnedge learned about the abortion/vaccine connection in 1999 when a group of health care workers in St. Louis objected to a county ordinance requiring all food handlers to obtain the hepatitis-A vaccine.  Some workers objected on grounds the vaccine has “tainted” origins.  (Both pharmaceutical manufacturers of the hepatitis-A vaccine, SmithKline Beecham and Merck & Company, use the MRC-5 line to produce it.)

Press coverage in a number of Catholic media outlets, including the Register, reported the views of a number of moral theologians and bioethicists on the morality of using the hepatitis-A vaccine.  The majority, including Richard Doerflinger, associate director of policy and planning with the US bishops’ secretariat for pro-life activities, concluded that while the development of any vaccine with aborted tissue is entirely immoral and should be categorically opposed, the use of the hepatitis-A vaccine is permissible in the absence of any alternative means of prevention against the disease.

But both those supporting and opposing the use of such vaccines agree that the best solution would be the development of ethical alternatives that did not involve tissues obtained through abortions.  Father Stephen Torraco, professor of theology at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass, told the Register last month that “society has the moral obligation to pursue alternatives.”

When the St. Louis controversy erupted two years ago, Vinnedge had already launched Children of God for Life to oppose embryonic stem cell research that relied on the destruction of human embryos.  She immediately saw a parallel to the vaccine issue.  Based on the arguments to justifying its use, she worried that some legislators and researchers would argue that any therapeutic benefits from killed embryos could be deemed morally licit.

In fact, after President Bush made his decision in August allowing federal funding of stem cell research using cell lines derived from already killed embryos, he further justified it with a letter to the New York Times citing the development of the chickenpox vaccine, manufactured on the MRC-5 line, as an analogy demonstrating that such research was morally acceptable.

Vinnedge worries that this argument opens the door to an after-the-fact justification of all stem cell research.  “What’s to stop them in the future from saying that it is remote material cooperation to benefit from research on embryo derived stem cells?”, she asked.

The Ethical Alternatives

The best practical way to forestall the pressure in favor of embryo-destroying research, many pro-life advocates say, is to show that ethical alternatives exist.  Vinnedge has discovered such alternatives already have been approved for several diseases, including polo, mumps, rabies and measles.  She has posted the information on her web site and parents can specify that non-abortion-derived vaccines must be used when doctors vaccinate their children.

Vinnedge has also found an ethical alternative for the rubella vaccine.  While Merck dissected at least 27 babies to acquire its virus, a Japanese vaccine was developed simply by swabbing the throat of an infected child.  Vinedge is currently working through the arduous process of seeking FDA approval for the Japanese vaccine’s use in America.

In the meantime, she is frequently contacted by parents who are distraught by the abortion/vaccine connection.  In Oklahoma, a father of five, a lawyer wrote to her, “We are a Catholic family and were shocked to find our deeply held religious beliefs so callously disregarded.  Abortion is wrong.  Profiting from abortion is wrong. Making us accomplices to this evil is beyond wrong.”

A California mother of three children, expecting her fourth baby recently wrote, “After learning about the sick method in which vaccines are developed, I will not give my children any more shots…I will not cooperate with evil.”

For parents like these, and for Catholics in general, Vinnedge’s campaign to pressure vaccine manufacturers to find alternatives looks like the most promising solution to an ugly ethical dilemma.

“We support urging the companies to do it differently, ” said Doerflinger, the US bishops’ pro-life aide. ” I think Debi Vinnedge has done tremendous work in focusing people’s attention on this issue.”

Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.