Several COVID-19 Vaccines Are Made Using Aborted Fetal Cells

Several COVID-19 Vaccines Are Made Using Aborted Fetal Cells by Dr. Joseph Mercola for Mercola

In addition to standard concerns over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is the moral dilemma of taking vaccines made with aborted fetal cells. For many, this alone is a cause for objection. Several of the vaccine candidates, including AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, are made using aborted fetal cell lines.^1,2

Several fact checkers — including Politifact,³ The Associated Press⁴ and Snopes⁵ — have labeled the claim as “false,” but is it? As it turns out, fact checkers are relying on semantics to “debunk” this claim. In reality, most thinking individuals are able to determine the truth of the matter once the details are explained.

Semantics and Technicalities Used to ‘Debunk’ the Truth

A common mistake by less experienced citizen journalists is to use rather general terms, assuming people will “get the gist” without having to be overly specific, and this is precisely what self-declared fact checkers home in on when rating something false or misleading.

Fact checkers routinely rely on semantics and technicalities to break apart a given claim, and unless you carefully read their explanation, you’re likely to miss this and simply write it off based on the headline claiming something to be false. The case of COVID-19 vaccines containing aborted fetal cells is a perfect example of this, so let’s go through some of what you need to know before discounting this claim off-hand.

Commonly Used Fetal Cell Lines

There are several cell lines commonly used in vaccine development that originate from aborted fetuses, including:⁶

• HEK293^7,8,9,10,11 — human embryonic cell line originally derived from kidney tissue obtained from a female fetus aborted in the Netherlands in 1972
• MRC5¹² — human embryonic cell line originally derived from the lung tissue of a 14-week-old male fetus aborted in 1966
• PER.C6¹³ — human embryonic cell line originally derived from the retina of an 18-week-old male fetus aborted in the Netherlands in 1985
• WI38¹⁴ — human embryonic cell line originally derived from the lung tissue of a 12-week-old female fetus aborted in 1961

Vaccine makers using at least one of these fetal cell lines in the development of their COVID-19 vaccines include:^15,16,17

Vaccine makers using either “ethically derived” cell lines, meaning cell lines that do not originate from aborted human fetuses, or no cell lines at all, include Moderna, Merck, Novavax, Sanofi Pasteur, Pfizer, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline and Sinovac.¹⁸

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