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ROME, Italy, February 25, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis’s new personal physician said last November that COVID-19 is “a normal illness.”
Italian media reported last year that Professor Roberto Bernabei, 69, the head of Geriatrics at the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, had discussed the virus in a grave but reasoned tone.
“If this disease mows down the elderly, it is a very serious thing, of course,” Bernabei said. “However, it is, how should I put it? A normal disease.”
“Unfortunately, viral illnesses attack the most fragile,” he added.
Bernabei, who graduated with a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Catholic University of Rome in 1976, also mentioned that almost always it is the elderly who die of COVID-19, as well as those with underlying causes.
“Practically, almost exclusively only the elderly die,” the gerontologist said. “The average age of the deceased since March is over 80 years old and [the deceased] has at least three pathologies.”
“To die of COVID, you need to be over 80 years old and have at least three pathologies.”
According to Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register, Bernabei is the successor to the late Dr. Fabrizio Soccorsi, who was Pope Francis’ doctor since 2015 but died this January at the age of 78. Soccorsi had been admitted to the Gemelli Hospital on December 26 with cancer but, according to Vatican News, died of “pulmonary complications” related to COVID-19.
Bernabei is also a professor of internal medicine at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and a board member of the European Academy for Medicine of Aging (EAMA). He has been married to American actress and convert to Catholicism Sydne Rome for over 30 years. Roberto Bernabei, a devout Catholic, was one of eight children born to Italian television producer Ettore Bernabei.
According to the Vatican Press Office, both Pope Francis, 84, and Pope Emeritus Benedict, 93, received doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in mid-January. Pope Francis called taking the Pfizer vaccine, which was tested on cell lines derived from an aborted baby girl, “an ethical choice” and said that “ethically, everyone should take the vaccine.”
“I don’t understand why some say, ‘No. Vaccines are dangerous,’” the Argentinian pontiff said. “If it is presented by doctors as a thing that can go well, that has no special dangers, why not take it? There is a suicidal denial that I wouldn’t know how to explain.”
The commonly used coronavirus vaccines, made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, have all caused sometimes severe side effects. On some occasions, healthy people have died within days after being vaccinated.
A 39-year-old woman with no known comorbidities died unexpectedly in northern Ohio within 48 hours of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, which was reportedly required by her employer.
A 27-year-old personal support worker suffered a severe allergic reaction including fainting, seizures, and hospitalization, when she received the abortion-tainted Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
In February, a new recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to have “intubation kits” at vaccination sites implicitly acknowledged a high number of adverse effects associated with getting the experimental COVID-19 vaccines.
In Italy this week, dozens of teachers called in sick after receiving vaccinations for COVID-19 over the weekend. They were vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s product.
Other observers have criticized the attempt to use vaccinations to control the population by introducing vaccine passports.
Earlier this month, U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab hinted that vaccine passports will be required for access to supermarkets and pubs.
In Israel, those who have not yet received the COVID vaccine, or who have refused to take the jab, will remain unable to access a number of venues and businesses as the economy slowly reopens.
Although the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has issued a statement assuring Catholics they could take even abortion-tainted COVID vaccines if there are no ethical alternatives available, many bishops and cardinals have spoken up against the use of such products.
In a paper released last December, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, along with co-signers Cardinal Janis Pujats, Bishop Joseph Strickland, and Archbishops Tomash Peta and Jan Pawel Lenga, expressed the strong conviction that any use of a vaccine tainted with the “unspeakable crime” of abortion “cannot be acceptable for Catholics” under any circumstances.
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.