Vatican calls for suspending intellectual property rights to distribute more COVID vaccines

[Stone]

Vatican calls for suspending intellectual property rights to distribute more COVID vaccines
COVID vaccine pushers have used the endorsement of Pope Francis as an excuse to disregard religious refusal of the shots.

Sat Mar 19, 2022
GENEVA (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican again declared this week the COVID-19 vaccines a public good warranting significant public action to disseminate globally, despite their use of aborted fetal cells causing great moral anguish for millions of Catholics and other Christians.

Vatican News reports that the Vatican Permanent Mission to the United Nations and Other International Organizations issued a statement Wednesday to the 49th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, warning that “barriers impeding the equitable access to, and distribution of vaccines, medicines and health-related technologies are deeply connected to the effects of intellectual property rights (IPRs).”

Declaring that health care for all should “never be subjugated to private interests,” the statement called for the “sharing of research, knowledge and supplies, also with a view to promoting integral human development globally,” in this case meaning that IPRs should temporarily be suspended for the sake of more widely and equitably distributing the COVID shots.

Such endorsements disregard the fact that the most widely-used COVID-19 vaccines used human cells derived from aborted babies to varying degrees in their development, which Christians recognize as an intolerable violation of the sanctity of human life. The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson shots, for instance, were developed with aborted fetal cells, whereas the Pfizer and Moderna shots were not, but their developers did use such cells during the testing phase.

Catholic teaching traditionally holds that abortion-tainted medical interventions are to be avoided if possible, though in cases where there is no better alternative to preserve life the decision should be left to individual conscience. Some bishops have argued that taking abortion-tainted vaccines is intrinsically evil, no matter the circumstances. Yet Pope Francis’s endorsement of the COVID vaccines has been cited from corporations all the way to the White House as justification for disregarding religious objections to taking them.

The Vatican’s promotion of the COVID vaccines also disregards significant unresolved doubts as to their safety in light of reports of significant numbers of adverse events including myocarditis, pericarditis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, and more; as well as their effectiveness and necessity in light of their inability to prevent transmission and the longer-lasting protection of natural immunity.