By DEACON MIKE MANNO
The question of the hour: Do we vaccinate or not? And if not, what to expect?
The answer to the second question is: Expect plenty, you will be treated like an outcast, accused of spreading the virus, and, in some quarters, called a murderer. And those are just the nice things they will say.
That’s the state of things today. And it starts from a political calculation which is derived from critical theory: set the public against one another by accusing one side of suppressing the other. In this case it is the minority non-vaxers that are the threat to the now oppressed vaxed class.
We’ve seen it with race (critical race theory), and now it might be called critical vax theory. And you can be canceled over it.
Many cities run by the child-killing side now have rules that unless you can prove your vax status you cannot enjoy the benefits of living there. You are not welcome in restaurants, movie theaters, retail shops, and a host of other facilities most of us patronize every day. No vax, no entry.
And more and more private domains are imposing their vaccine wokeness on customers and employees as well. Same is now happening in medical offices and hospitals. If you are not vaxed, you are not welcome. In fact, even though the vaccine may be detrimental to your health, no vax, no transplant list for you either. The jab is king — no exceptions.
Now, the follow-up question: Is this a political thing, or a science thing? Well, the answer is kind of complex and probably one of the reasons why so many folks are having a hard time sorting everything out. Problem is, whether our public officials are on a power trip or just looking for easy answers, vaccination has become a one-size-fits-all solution. So let’s take a look at a couple of issues that have passed under the radar:
The first is natural immunity.
While medical experts differ on whether or not the vaccine provides more immunity than natural immunity, there is a growing body of commentary that natural immunity — “earned” by those who have recovered from COVID-19 — is at least as effective as the artificial immunity the vaccine provides.
Unfortunately, the question of natural immunity has been regularly ignored. This means that we are on course for a major economic dislocation of those who have successfully survived the virus and have been counseled by their personal physicians that they don’t need to risk taking a vaccine that will, at best, only duplicate the immunity they already naturally have. Sadly, too many business owners, local politicians — including Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich — will only accept the jab, disregarding those with natural immunity.
You would think that those interested in public health would be seeking any immunity; yet most are only looking for the jab, a lazy man’s answer.
One expert, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says those formally infected by COVID are seven times more likely than vaccinated people to resist the disease. “It appears that natural immunity is better against the Delta variant. When you get infected with COVID, your body’s immune system develops antibodies to the entire surface of the virus,” he said. “Not just the slight protein that the vaccines give you, but the entire surface. And so you get a more diverse antibody portfolio in your system.”
A study by the Cleveland Clinic of over 50,000 employees over five months reported that those who had recovered from COVID-19 did not benefit from vaccination. Researchers found that no one who had recovered from the disease — those with natural immunity — became ill.
The downplaying (or ignoring natural immunity) will ultimately cause those with it to be denied employment, travel, education, and normal commercial activity. It will also allow local bureaucrats to continue use of their emergency powers not really knowing if we have reached “herd immunity,” which, apparently defies definition.
For example, the top health care guru, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had opined that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity. But then changed that to 75 to 80 percent. Now its 80 to 85 percent. Sounds more like herd immunity is what is convenient to our medical overlords, and not necessarily science.
If our public health community wants to play fair, that is to avoid playing a political game, they should insist on the recognition of natural immunity. As I suggested above, they should be more interested in immunity, not simply vaccination.
The second issue that must be recognized involves religious exemptions.
Religious exemptions for the vaccine are raised mainly by right-to-lifers. The objections center around the use of liver cells from a baby aborted in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago. From the cells from that baby’s liver scientists were able to create cells that could divide which allowed them to reproduce.
Those reproduced liver cells were used only for the testing and development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines but were never an ingredient of the medicine. Yet many still have concerns over the vaccinations due to their involvement with an aborted cell line. Pro-lifers ask, “If abortion is truly the evil the Church claims that it is, how can you ethically use such medication knowing that part of its history begins with the abortion of a child?”
We know those cells must have been taken from either a live fetus or one that had just been aborted, since cells from a dead infant would die and could not divide and reproduce as would be needed to provide the material for further use. Thus we know the fetus involved was not miscarried since the time involved to “harvest” the live cells would have prohibited the taking of live cells.
Many Catholic theologians and bioethicists, as well as many, if not most bishops, however, have concluded that it is morally licit to take such a vaccine since there is a “remoteness” between the abortion and the drug. Two documents from the Vatican, one from the Pontifical Academy for Life, and one from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have also approved the use of the vaccines since the pandemic is an “exceptional case” and the use of these cells is only “remote, passive, material cooperation with evil.”
Some insist that it is still an unacceptable cooperation with evil, no matter how remote.
And it must be recognized that despite the theological arguments in favor of the vaccine, there is a growing hard-core group of faithful people who, for religious and conscience reasons, will not take the vaccine.
As to the AstraZeneca vaccine there is a more serious moral question. In this case the manufacturer not only used an aborted cell line to test the vaccine, but also to develop it.
Of course there are many other concerns honest people have about vaxing, such as how it will affect those with serious medical problems that could be compromised by the vaccine.
This is not a simple vax or no-vax question. Unfortunately in a rush of political correctness to fight the disease, reasonable objections and medical opinions are being suppressed by those who should know better. Including the application of COVID therapeutics, such as hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, and regeneron that were condemned because Mr. Trump once mentioned them as a possible treatment.
Why are we focused on only vaccination and why do we ignore these other issues?
So who are the real killers?
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday at 10 a.m. Central Time on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)
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