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  • 2021-10-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine Contain Aborted Fetal Cells? (en)
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  • In October 2021, a number of social media users started spreading the claim that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine contained aborted fetal cells. There are no aborted fetal cells in Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. This claim spawns from a video that was released by Project Veritas, a conservative activist group that has previously been found to use deceptive practices and misleading edits in their videos, on October 6, 2021, that supposedly showed leaked emails from Pfizer employees about how they wanted to downplay the role fetal cells played in the development of the vaccine. One of the most popular screenshots reportedly showed an email in which Pfizer employees said that they tried really hard not to share information about fetal cells being used during the testing of the COVID-19 vaccine: This email does not say that aborted fetal cells are in the vaccine. It says that a fetal cell line, which is basically a line of cloned cell copies, was used during testing. While Pfizer may have not wanted to advertise this information, this also wasn't much of a secret. The fact that fetal cell lines were being used to test COVID-19 vaccines has been public since at least July 2020, months before these vaccines were first administered. We wrote about a similar rumor regarding the COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson in March 2021. The Pfizer vaccine does not contain aborted fetal cells, but a fetal cell line was used during testing. So what exactly does this mean? How close is the link from vaccine to abortion? In this case, about 50 years. The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine used the HEK293T cell line during the testing phrase. This cell line ( a cell line is basically a series of cloned cell copies from original cell) can be traced back to 1973, about 48-years ago, when a kidney cell was isolated from a terminated fetus (it's unclear if this was from an abortion or a miscarriage). James Lawler, the Associate Professor of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Nebraska Medical Center, said: While many people have objected to taking a vaccine that was tested with fetal cell lines, saying that it is against their religion, the Vatican put out a statement in December 2020 saying that it was morally acceptable for people to take the COVID-19 vaccine. The Vatican clarified that while they were not endorsing the use of fetal cell lines, they believed that it was morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process when alternatives were not available. The COVID-19 vaccines were hardly the first drug to be tested on fetal cell lines. In fact, most modern medicine has some connection to fetal cell lines. Lawler said: The bottom line is almost all the medical products we use have in some way been touched by research that’s been done on fetal cell lines. It's also worth noting that the same fetal cell line (HEK293) that was used to test Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was also used to test Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatment, REGEN-COV, the drug that former United States President Donald Trump took after contracting COVID-19. A spokesperson for Regeneron told Newsweek: (en)
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