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VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — As part of the Pontifical Academy for Life’s public health conference, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia was joined by a number of prominent global health figures to both promote the abortion-tainted COVID injections, and attack “vaccine hesitancy.” Participants described such hesitancy as “difficult to understand.”

Opening the Pontifical Academy for Life’s (PAV) current conference, entitled “Public health in global perspective: Pandemic, bioethics, future,” Paglia declared that the “backdrop” for the conference was Pope Francis’ “central message in his Encyclical Fratelli Tutti.”

The conference, running September 27–29, is being held “[i]n the light of the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic,” and hosts a number of speakers who are pro-abortion and pro-LGBT. A PAV press release ahead of the conference described the global disruption due to COVID-19 related restrictions as a “crisis … too dramatic to be wasted.”

Central to many of the speeches given both at the in-person conference, and the press conference, was the theme that brotherhood, as envisaged in Fratelli Tutti, involves promoting and taking the COVID-19 injections as an act of love, in addition to appealing for a global health policy.

Meanwhile, at a papal audience granted to members of the conference physically present in Rome, Pope Francis declared that “we are right to take all measures to contain and defeat Covid-19 globally,” calling for a wide-reaching health policy not just limited to vaccines.

Priority for Western countries is vaccines’

Drawing from the controversial papal document Fratelli Tutti, Paglia stated that it was “unacceptable that some people are privileged at the expense of others,” and that the COVID era had highlighted how “the health of every single individual is connected to the health of all individuals.”

In addressing the media September 28, Paglia did not seem to perceive any contradiction when he called for global vaccination with the abortion-tainted COVID injections, which rely on the cell line of a baby aborted in 1973 in order to exist.

Noting how the current “priority for Western countries is vaccines” and that “vaccination is crucial for a global protection against Covid-19,” Paglia called for “a global health policy that makes access to care more equitable.”

The archbishop was echoing his own words before the conference, when he described “the greatest vaccination effort ever made in history” as “the priority,” before describing “vaccination” as “crucial” in protecting against COVID-19.

Vaccine hesitancy most difficult to understand’

One of the notable pro-abortion speakers at the conference was Dr. David Barbe, president of the pro-abortion World Medical Association (WMA), who repeatedly attacked those who have not taken the experimental COVID shots.

Decrying the vaccination rates “especially in lower income and lower-middle income countries” as “embarrassingly low,” Barbe alluded to national stockpiling and poor logistics as underlying factors dwarfed by “vaccine hesitancy.”

“The most difficult to understand factor is vaccine hesitancy,” he said. Defending the injections while simultaneously acknowledging their speed of development and novel technology, Barbe slated the “global network of misinformation and distortion regarding the risks and benefits of the vaccine.”

“Breakthrough cases after vaccination, the concern of waning immunity and the likely need for subsequent boosters have all contributed to the hesitancy,” he added, without clarifying the reasoning behind the continued push for the injections, despite studies out of Israel showing that Pfizer’s injection caused “mortality hundreds of times greater in young people compared to mortality from coronavirus without the vaccine, and dozens of times more in the elderly.”

Alluding to an “unprecedented” amount of “skepticism and doubt regarding the ‘science’” behind the injections, Barbe said, “Physicians and other health professionals are the most trusted voices.”

“We must continue to promote valid and transparent information, stress the benefits of the vaccine and continue to point out the significantly greater risk of the natural disease.”

“Worldwide the anti-vax sentiment has been rising in almost all countries before the pandemic,” he said in comments to the media Tuesday, before criticizing the “anti-vax” stance for not accepting that “what science understood in the middle of 2020 is different to what science understands now.”

Barbe then furthered Pope Francis’ theme, saying, “This great crisis should give us a great opportunity.” He said the world must “address the current crisis and prepare for the next.”

The need to win over ‘persons ideologically opposed to vaccination’

Barbe’s promotion of the injections in the Vatican walls was echoed by Nobel Prize winning biologist Jules Hoffman, who not only hailed the “highly efficient vaccines already available,” but suggested future medication in a pill format.

“Administration of pills containing small molecules will hopefully remove one day the threat of SARS-CoV-2 from humanity, in all areas of the world, whether rich or poor, and in all segments of societies, including the persons ideologically opposed to vaccination.”

Hoffman’s suggestion comes some months after researchers developed a polymer “wafer,” bearing a striking resemblance to the host used at a Catholic Mass, that they predicted could become the vaccine of the future.

Indeed, in 2011, Hoffman described those who do not wish to receive vaccines as “criminal,” adding that “there is no scientific reason why you would refuse to be vaccinated.”

In a curious turn of phrase, another speaker — pro-abortion and pro-LGBT director of the Pan American Health Association Dr. Carissa Etienne — praised Pope Francis for having “consistently defended the dignity of human life.”

Calling for global health policies which “will be in the interest of all God’s people, irrespective of what country they have been born into,” Etienne also repeated the attack on “vaccine hesitancy” and “the politicization of science,” which were part of the process “facilitating the generation and proliferation of ever more dangerous variants.”

Ex-friar Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, who disagrees with the Church’s teaching that life begins at conception, is due to speak Tuesday, the second day of the conference, while pro-abortion Rabbi Avraham Steinberg is to lead a biblical reflection.

The Pontifical Academy for Life itself has been described as being permeated by “heretical gnosticism” after it was overhauled by Pope Francis beginning in 2016. The Pope released new statutes for the PAV in November 2016, in which members were no longer required to sign a declaration that they uphold the Church’s pro-life teachings, while also expanding the PAV’s mandate to include a focus on the environment.

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