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July 16, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – An editorial published in the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) has suggested that experimental COVID-19 jabs should be made mandatory at Catholic colleges, churches, and parochial schools, describing the abortion-tainted injections as a “moral obligation.” 

In an op-ed entitled “US Catholic colleges and churches should require vaccination” published July 15, the NCR said “COVID-19 remains a public health menace.” 

The NCR – which has called the pro-life movement a “tool for right-wing authoritarianism” and said that the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have fought in federal court for relief from an Obamacare mandate to provide contraceptives as health care, were merely “portraying themselves as victims of government bullying” – argued that everyone must take the experimental shot.

“Everyone has a moral obligation to get vaccinated unless they have a legitimate medical condition prohibiting them from doing so,” the editors said, adding it’s “not even a close call.”

The call for mass vaccination echoes Pope Francis’s January 9 statement that “ethically, everyone should take the vaccine… it must be done.”  

The article suggested that there is a “race” underway in the United States between the rate at which Americans get vaccinated and the rate at which the virus mutates into variants which “may diminish the effectiveness of the vaccines.” 

Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory research for now-coronavirus vaccine maker Pfizer, remarked in comments sent to LifeSiteNews this week that the variants are “irrelevant and being used as propaganda.” 

“It’s true that when this virus, SARS-CoV-2, replicates inside our cells, it occasionally makes a ‘molecular typo’ error. Instead of a letter A, for example, we might see a letter U,” said Yeadon, who worked in the vaccine industry for over thirty years and retired from a senior research position.  

Yeadon said the “typos” are insignificant given the human immune system’s ability to combat the variants, and said that none of the coronavirus variants is more than 0.3 percent altered from the “original Wuhan sequence,” meaning each variant is at least 99.7 percent identical to the original strain. 

Nevertheless, NCR cited Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who recently appeared on CNN calling unvaccinated people “potential variant factories,” explaining that “the more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply.” 

“Against such weighty moral and medical concerns, it is shocking that so many millions of Americans still resist getting vaccinated,” the op-ed said. “Shocking, but not surprising.” 

The editorial team referred to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “Trumpian wannabees” and some Catholic clergy who they argued “somehow think not getting vaccinated is a sign of toughness.”  

“How did a fight against a virus become a battle in the culture wars?” the article asked. 

But the conclusions drawn by the editorial team are not shared by many American Catholics, who have noticed that the coronavirus is not dangerous for the majority of people and tend to distrust the necessity of experimental drugs that were rushed through production, were tested or produced using the cell lines of aborted infants, and lack full approval from the FDA. 

The vaccines have now been linked to at least 9,048 deaths and 26,818 hospitalizations across all age groups, according to passive reporting submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a jump of over 2,000 reported deaths from last week.  

Reports submitted to VAERS, which is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the United States, require further investigation before causal relationships may be determined.  

However, a Harvard study noted that adverse reactions are commonly underreported to VAERS, suggesting that the numbers may be even higher. 

Recorded instances have already led to significant actions by federal public health departments. 

Adverse reactions to the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shots led to a temporary pause of the company’s shots by the FDA and CDC in April for causing blood clots in women. In June the FDA added a label to fact sheets for the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, warning of heart inflammation after 1,200 cases of post-vaccination heart inflammation were reported to U.S. authorities.  

This month, the FDA added a new warning to the J&J shot cautioning about a neurological disorder linked to the jab which can cause paralysis. 

As previously noted by LifeSiteNews, the rate of death from COVID-19 shots as reported to VAERS presently exceeds the recorded death rate of more than 70 vaccines combined over the past 30 years. Based on VAERS reporting, the experimental injections are linked to roughly 500 times more deaths than the seasonal flu shot which has historically been the most dangerous. 

In addition to concerning reports of vaccine-related deaths and injuries, the injections have raised serious moral objections among Catholics for their close ties with abortion

Moderna and Pfizer used cell lines derived from aborted babies for testing, while J&J’s shot was directly produced in the human fetal cell line PER.C6, which was derived from retinal tissue taken from an 18-week-old baby boy who was aborted in the Netherlands in 1985 and converted into a fetal cell line in 1995. 

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said that if “ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available… it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process” if there is a grave reason.

However Bishop Joseph Strickland has argued that “there is no medical necessity for using aborted children in order to develop the much-needed vaccine to protect us from this particular strain of Coronavirus.”

“[I]f a vaccine for this virus is only attainable if we use body parts of aborted children then I will refuse the vaccine,” Strickland said. “I will not kill children to live”

Nonetheless the editorial team at NCR invoked the “pro-life witness of the Catholic Church” which they say ought to extend to “the necessity of getting vaccinated.” 

According to the editorial, Catholic colleges and universities ought to impose vaccine mandates, but the requirements shouldn’t be isolated to higher education.  

“Parochial schools should consider requiring vaccination, too,” the writers argue, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of all deaths attributed to COVID-19 occurred in patients 75 years old and older, while less than 0.06 percent of all reported deaths occurred in children 17 and under. 

The NCR editorial went on to recommend that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops should ask all pastors to preach, and preach repeatedly, on the moral necessity of getting vaccinated.” 

“Getting vaccinated is not only a way to protect oneself but to protect us all,” the editors concluded. “If ever there was a moral obligation, this is it.”  

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here. 

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