IOWA CITY, Iowa (LifeSiteNews) — Secular public health policies for COVID-19 and the emergency use authorization of the vaccine had a disastrous impact on society, but for Catholics, it was especially burdensome due to its threat to our religious freedom and ability to have access to the sacraments. Throughout the pandemic, Church authorities at all levels of hierarchy ceded authority to secular entities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO). All three of these entities are now admitting to serious scientific mistakes, and corporate and government whistleblowers are publicizing corruption within these organizations (1, 2). This has not only led to a lack of confidence in our public health institutions and healthcare system, but anger and lack of confidence among Catholics towards the Catholic Church for supporting this secular agenda. This raises the following questions: (a) Was the failure of the vaccine predictable? (b) Was there a scientific and religious infrastructure in place within the Vatican to properly advise the Pope on policies of science and religion? If so, was there a breakdown in the advisory system, and how did secular health authorities convince the Vatican to abandon its historic position on vaccines? (c) Why should the Catholic Church maintain its authority and decision making separate from secular authorities during a pandemic? (d) Would there have been a different medical outcome if the Church had held fast to its historic medical position on vaccines that are derived from abortion? These are the questions that will be answered below.
A. Was the failure of the vaccine predictable?
The primary rationale for why the Catholic Church and secular authorities pushed for universal vaccine acceptance was the notion that vaccinations would stop viral transmission and, as a result, end the pandemic. Yet, there was abundant scientific evidence published before the pandemic which supported the notion that respiratory vaccines when intramuscularly administered failed to prevent viral transmission because they do not enhance what is called “respiratory mucosal immunity.” If one conducts a scientific citation search on PubMed, which is the government’s main healthcare search engine, there are 802 citations from 2000-2019 on the topic of vaccines and respiratory mucosal immunity. I have cited only a small fraction of these references (3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16). Natural immunity is more robust and durable than vaccine immunity since it produces respiratory mucosal immunity. This stronger immunity develops because the respiratory tract is being exposed to the entire virus, comprised of all the viral components, to elicit a multi-staged and redundant immune response that decreases or stops viral replication to a level that prevents or reduces the risk of subsequent viral transmission. In contrast, the current COVID-19 vaccines bypass the respiratory tract and only deliver the spike protein, thereby mounting a shorter and weaker immune response and posing a greater risk of enabling mutations that allow the virus to escape immunity, and thus prolonging the pandemic (17,18,19,20,21,22). Moreover, since the vaccine does not activate respiratory mucosal immunity, it cannot prevent viral transmission. This observation is consistent with published data from countries outside of the United States, which showed the advantage of natural immunity over vaccine immunity (23,24,25). Vaccines against respiratory viruses only reduce respiratory symptoms in the short-term, but have to be redesigned periodically because viral mutations quickly emerge (26, 27). Even the annual influenza vaccine does not prevent transmission and has not consistently been shown in some studies to reduce death and hospitalization in the elderly (28) or in adults with serious co-morbidities (29). Consequently, the secular public health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry would have been aware of this medical literature, but instead chose to make false claims that vaccine immunity was superior to natural immunity and prevented transmission.
B. Was there a scientific and religious infrastructure within the Vatican to properly advise the Pope on policies of science and religion? If so, was there a breakdown in the advisory system, and how did secular health authorities convince the Vatican to abandon its historic position on vaccines?
While it is understandable that His Holiness would lack the necessary scientific and medical expertise to confront a pandemic, it raises the obvious question of who is advising the Pope and the Church hierarchy on matters of science and bioethics and to accept and promote secular public health positions. Within the Catholic Church there are three Pontifical Academies that advise the Pope on matters of science and faith and how that science should interface with Catholic teaching: the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy for Life, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy for Life provided any scientific or bioethical arguments to dissuade the Pope on the COVID-19 vaccines based on their safety, efficacy, or morality and from accepting the secular agenda that was being promoted by big pharmaceutical companies, governments, and the media.
The aforementioned scientific facts about natural immunity and respiratory virus vaccines failing to prevent transmission should have been communicated from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to the Church hierarchy. Instead, the Pope accepted advice from pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, which has been penalized by the U.S. government for more illegal activity than any other pharmaceutical company (30). Moreover, His Holiness was also persuaded by secular scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci because of the latter’s role as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (31). Yet, during the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, along with other public health authorities, made false claims that vaccine immunity was superior to natural immunity.
Dr. Fauci has a history of supervising controversial and unethical medical experiments with AIDS patients (32). He also conducted experiments on foster children, which are considered a vulnerable population group for whom the National Research Act of 1974 require special protection (33). Moreover, Dr. Fauci had a significant financial conflict of interest with the mRNA vaccines since the NIAID holds patents to mRNA vaccine technology and ultimately licensed this technology to the vaccine producer Moderna (34). Thus, rather than consulting a body of independent, devout Catholic scientists, physicians and ethicists with integrity who had the expertise to integrate the science with Catholic teaching, and are free of conflicts of interest, the Vatican did not conduct its due diligence. Instead, the Church allowed itself to be unduly influenced by secular public health authorities and drug companies with commercial financial conflicts of interests and ethical controversies.
The emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine is not the first time that the Vatican Academies have failed to take prompt and proactive action against morally-tainted medicines produced from the pharmaceutical industry. Aborted fetal cells have been used for the past 70 years to produce childhood vaccines, gene therapies, cell therapies, diagnostics, research reagents, and protein therapeutics (35). It should have been the responsibility of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which was formed in 1936, to bring these scientific issues to the Pontifical Academy for Life long before 2005 in order to provide a religiously grounded recommendation based on Catholic teaching to the Holy See. Due to the long delay in addressing this underlying problem, we now have ubiquitous medical products and services derived from aborted fetal cells, comprising over a 100 billion dollar global annual market for the pharmaceutical industry (36). This disturbing trend represents one of the biggest threats to all Catholics and the viability of Catholic healthcare. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has repeatedly failed to meet its stated goals and statutes (37, 38).
Nevertheless, in December 2020 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) published a statement which clearly stated that the COVID-19 vaccine was morally permissible, but vaccine acceptance should be voluntary and was not morally obligatory (39). The December 2020 CDF statement is based on the foundation of the Pontifical Academy for Life’s 2005 position on morally-tainted vaccines, which concluded that such vaccines are morally permissible only if the medical condition is grave and there is no available ethical medical option (40). However, the Pope chose to ignore the CDF statement and instead aligned his position on the vaccine with secular scientific authorities with questionable ethics.
C. Why should the Catholic Church maintain its authority and decision making separate from secular authorities during a pandemic?
The Vatican has an obligation to pursue scientific and spiritual truth before they wholeheartedly support, promote, and implement an experimental and untested vaccine technology to millions of Catholics in an unprecedented short amount of time that could potentially inflict serious health risks. The Catholic Church enabled secular public health authorities and contributed to serious harm inflicted on Catholics. Many Catholics struggled between their religious values about using a morally-tainted medicine and a vaccine mandate which threatened their educational pursuits and careers. Those who refused the vaccine for religious and moral reasons were vilified and treated as scapegoats for prolonging the pandemic, because that was what the secular world said. Vaccine mandates created strife and division among friends and within families. Catholics were coerced to accept the vaccine even at Catholic institutions or face losing their educational enrollment, employment and livelihoods for an experimental vaccine that was based on unproven technology and which normally requires 10-15 years to receive regulatory approval. Church masses were shut down, sometimes for several months; sacraments were unavailable, even for the sick and the dying; mask mandates were implemented despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting their efficacy; children were forced to wear masks or prevented from attending school in person, thereby leading to increased mental illness, child abuse, suicides, and significant setbacks and regression in education; and religious services were considered non-essential by secular health authorities, while businesses such as liquor stores, abortion clinics, and marijuana shops were deemed essential.
Secularism does not have the same priorities and values as the Catholic Church. Secularism places priority on the physical state, while the Catholic Church is supposed to place higher priority on the spiritual life. When the Catholic Church abandoned its religious authority to secular authority, the Catholic Church reacted by trying to adapt spiritual euphemisms to align itself with and justify secular agendas. This was apparent when the Pope made the statement that universal vaccine acceptance is an “act of love” (41,42). Yet, the “act of love” position is a flawed argument from both a scientific and spiritual foundational premise (43). It is not “an act of love” if individuals are lied to and are not given medical informed consent and not told that the vaccine will not prevent viral transmission. It is not “an act of love” if you are subjecting healthy, low risk individuals (particularly children) with an experimental gene therapy that poses serious adverse health risks, potentially including death, while it offers no protection against viral transmission. It is not “an act of love” if you coerce someone with an experimental medicine by holding their life and livelihood at stake with a vaccine mandate, which under any other circumstance is medically unethical and legally unlawful based on the 1974 National Research Act (44). It is not an “act of love” if you are forcing pregnant women to take a vaccine that has not been rigorously tested for safety during pregnancy and carries a risk of causing birth defects or fetal death.
In contrast to secular public health authorities, whose mission is to apply the current science to determine and shape public health policies, the Catholic Church also has an additional responsibility to consider factors that are within the context of its spiritual mission. What we observed was that the Catholic Church retreated towards a focus premised on safety, rather than pursing its mission of saving souls and administering the sacraments. Medical safety needs to be interpreted in light of Catholic teaching, and the Church needs to decide how it is going to handle it in the modern world – simply go along with medical injustice or speak out against it. People should have the choice to go to Mass, even if it may put them at risk of catching a virus. Priests should be willing to take such risks as a matter of their vocation. Priests in Nigeria, China, and Nicaragua risk their lives and experience persecution every day to bring Mass and the sacraments to their people. Catholics have lost their lives in the Middle East and Africa by defending their faith. Priests should consider themselves essential workers – just like doctors and nurses, as well as the person who works at the grocery store. Show me where it says in the Bible that Jesus emphasized safety over suffering and sacrifice as He demonstrated by allowing Himself to be crucified for our sake. Had the present ideal of “safety” permeated the early Church, there would have been no martyrs and no Catholic Church today. How often have we heard that the seed of the Church is the blood of the martyrs.
D. Would there have been a different medical outcome if the Church held fast to its historic medical position on vaccines that are derived from abortion?
The Pontifical Academy for Life in its 2005 position on morally tainted vaccines stated that they were morally permissible if the medical condition was grave and there were no ethical alternative medicines. Yet, there were many reports that early treatment using repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin reduced mortality and hospitalization (45,46,47,48). Yet, at no time did the Catholic Church advocate for early treatment or allow doctors to freely practice medicine. There were many Catholics who were denied religious exemptions from schools, businesses, and government agencies because those secular organizations weaponized the Pope’s comments. Many were forced to take the vaccine and subsequently suffered serious health injuries or death. It is highly likely that if the Catholic Church had held fast to its original 2005 doctrinal position, the following situations would have occurred: (a) government mandates would not have endured at all, or not as long, because of lack of Catholic Church support; (b) there would have been far fewer deaths from COVID because of political and public support for early treatment; (c) there would have been much fewer vaccine injuries; and (d) the pandemic would have been stopped sooner because natural immunity would have eventually prevailed and multiple viral variants would not have emerged from use of the vaccines.
Closing Statement
Secular public health policies for COVID-19 and the emergency use authorization of the vaccine had a disastrous impact on society, but for Catholics, it had an especially detrimental burden because of its impact on our religious freedom and ability to have access to the sacraments. The Catholic Church ceded its authority to secular public health authorities, which have now been shown to have made serious scientific and public health policy mistakes. The scientific failure of vaccine effectiveness was predictable and ignored by the secular public health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. There are now indications that there will be investigations and a review of our public healthcare system. Many secular and religious institutions will claim that they simply followed public health directives from the CDC, which may not hold up to legal scrutiny and definitely should not be excused for abandoning independent, critical, and ethical thinking. While individuals who experienced serious vaccine injury will have to pursue compensation and legal recourse from governments, schools, and businesses, the Catholic Church and Catholic institutions have a moral obligation to provide financial and medical restitution to students and employees who suffered serious vaccine injuries if they were coerced by these Catholic institutions to take the vaccine and were denied religious exemptions. Lastly, the Vatican needs to reform the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy for Life and improve their performance in providing timely and sound moral advice to the Vatican hierarchy, and such advice should conform to Catholic teaching. More importantly, the Pope must listen to and adhere to that recommended moral advice. If such reforms and performance are not realized, then it will be up to other non-Vatican Catholic lay organizations to fill these roles and challenge the positions of Catholic authorities when they contradict the Magisterium. Moreover, the Catholic hierarchy needs to maintain their independent decision-making free from secular influences and follow the Magisterium as stated in the positions of the 2005 Pontifical Academy for Life and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Vatican needs to restore confidence among its flock for a variety of issues, and healthcare is the newest problem that needs to be reformed.Lastly, friends and families who were divided over the purported vaccine claims need to reconcile their differences.
Dr. Alan B. Moy is a pulmonologist and the founder of the John Paul II Medical Research Institute.