The Guardian: “The archdiocese of New Orleans, as well as Roman Catholic leaders in St Louis, Missouri, have told local Catholics to avoid the Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid-19 vaccine, because its early development used “morally compromised cell lines created from two abortions”.
The leadership in New Orleans said two other vaccines in use in the US, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, were acceptable despite having been developed with “some lab testing that utilised the abortion-derived cell line”. The archdiocese made the announcement on Friday.
The statement put the archdiocese at odds with Pope Francis. In December, the Vatican said it was “morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted foetuses in their research and production process”, as the use of such vaccines “does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive”.”