As thousands of employees submit and wait for their employers to process their religious exemption requests, now is a good time to answer arguments against COVID vaccine objectors.
Krista Kafer, political columnist from the Denver Post, recently asked “how far will religious objectors to vaccines go?” I thought the article was worth responding to because it contains several arguments commonly lodged and used against those trying desperately to follow their conscience in the face of government and corporate coercion.
Kafer’s arguments show not just a lack of moral clarity on the issue but also ignorance of the legal issues involved. However, it does accurately restate the typical arguments you will here at family dinner parties, upcoming work Christmas parties (if you still have them in person anymore), and even talking points your own physicians may push on you.
Perhaps more importantly is that the arguments contained in this piece are typical ones many employers across the nation are using to deny employees exemptions from jabbing themselves with the COVID mRNA gene manipulating drug as a condition of keeping their employment. Those who maintain strong religious and moral objections need to understand the sleight of hand going on here with these arguments in order to educate your employer (if necessary) on why coercing employees to take an experimental drug against their will that violates their religious beliefs and conscience in order to maintain employment is not only a grave offense against God, but in most cases, illegal.
You can read Kafer’s full opinion piece here but I respond to each point she makes below in BOLD RED.
Answering the Arguments
Does vaccine refusal reflect a genuine religious belief or is it merely a personal preference? If it is the former, does it merit protection under the First Amendment?
For most people applying for religious exemptions, the answer is both. But for those holding religious and moral objections to stabbing themselves with an evil, experimental drug to combat a disease with an extremely low death rate, this initial question automatically displays an ignorance of what is at stake. The legal issue involved for most people is not the First Amendment. Private business and employers are not required to afford their employees First Amendment protections. Government employers, on the other hand, are prohibited from violating their employees’ constitutional rights. The real question for thousands of Americans is: whether sincerely held religious beliefs are entitled to protection under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and similar state anti-discrimination laws? The answer is yes, and private businesses and employers are legally bound not to discriminate against their employees based on their religious and moral beliefs.
Last week a federal judge denied a preliminary injunction against the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s COVID19 vaccine mandate. UCHealth established an Oct. 1 deadline for personnel to be vaccinated and fired 119 employees who did not comply. A Catholic doctor and a Buddhist medical student are challenging the requirement in court. Neither is vaccinated.
I would bet that the plaintiffs in that lawsuit have been “vaccinated.” In fact, one of the plaintiff’s arguments was that the University allowed exemptions for those who opposed all vaccines but failed to recognize their specific religious and moral objections to the COVID shot. The reason the University discriminated on this basis is of course because the COVID shot mandate is a politically and ideologically driven issue, not a medical one. These plaintiffs probably received all types of vaccines over the course of their lives, just like millions of other objectors to THIS so called “vaccine.” A big difference between the COVID shot and real vaccines is that it manipulates an individual’s genes to trick the body into creating spike proteins. It does not trigger a natural immune system response using attenuated viruses as many have been misled into believing by BigPharma’s public relations ploy that uses of the word “vaccine” to describe these dangerous drugs.
Both claim to object to the COVID-19 vaccine because of their religious beliefs.
Let me guess—Kafer doesn’t really believe their beliefs are sincere?
They are refusing the vaccine because abortion-derived fetal cell lines were used in their development. Pfizer and Moderna tested their vaccines on such cells while Johnson and Johnson uses them in the production of its vaccine. Cell lines are originally derived from living tissue and can be grown indefinitely in the lab through cellular replication. The cell lines used by the first two companies are descended from kidney cells taken from a baby aborted in 1973. The latter company uses cells removed from another’s eyes in 1985.
Why even mention the years that the babies whose cell lines were used to develop and test these mRNA gene manipulating drugs were murdered? The year those babies were murdered is not relevant because the drug companies continue to use those same cell lines over and over again for their profit and gain. The lapse of time since 1973 doesn’t make these drugs any more moral than if the abortions occurred last week.
Refusing medical interventions connected to human death and suffering is commendable but more challenging than one might think given its ubiquity.
It’s not just a matter of refusing medical interventions because they were connected to human death and suffering. Indeed, humanity has benefited in many ways from death and suffering. Rather, many with religious and moral objections are refusing “medical interventions” because the drug the government wishes to inject into our bodies was produced through the murder of innocent babies, a grave sin against God and humanity. Others are also objecting on religious and moral grounds because this “medical intervention” is actually involuntary medical experimentation forced on unwilling citizens, which violates the Fifth Commandment against self-harm, assaults the natural law right to bodily integrity and violates well-established principles of international human rights, especially the Nuremberg Code.
The rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis A, and Imovax rabies vaccines all involve the exploitation of fetal cell lines in their production.
This is true and these vaccines should also be avoided. I suspect many Americans have no idea these vaccines were immorally developed. Perhaps more education needs to be done?
Cell lines were also used in the research and development of common medicines like ibuprofen, Tums, Zoloft, Prilosec, Benadryl, and Remdesivir, a COVID treatment. These vaccines and medications relieve human suffering and save lives.
Ah…so here we get into the meat of this fallacious argument, which implies that those opposed to the COVID shots currently available are hypocrites. Now remember, the murdered baby whose cell lines are used is referred to as HEK-293. 293 refers to the baby number used to develop the line. 292 dead babies were butchered before they got a “good line” to use. This abortion occurred in the year 1973. Now, let’s go through each medication listed:
- Ibuprofen was discovered in 1961 and first marketed in the UK in 1969 so this was not developed or produced thanks to aborted babies;
- TUMS was developed in 1928 by James Harvey Howe, in the basement of his house and first produced for sale in 1930 and not developed or produced thanks to aborted babies;
- Zoloft (sertraline) was developed in 1977 but without the use of aborted fetal cell lines. Homogenated rodent tissues (liver and brain) were used for the in vitro testing and rat models were used for testing;
- For Prilosec I found no evidence that it was developed using HEK cell lines. It may have been tested on fetal cell lines at some point, but I could not confirm it was initially developed and created with the help of using fetal cell lines;
- Benadryl was FDA approved in 1946 so this was not developed or produced thanks to aborted babies;
- Remdesivir was tested on aborted baby cell lines. You should not use this drug. This drug is not ubiquitous like TUMS. I don’t know why the author used this as an example other than hospitals also like to use it to treat COVID. There are plenty of other moral, safe, and effective options to treat COVID such as Ivermectin.
Should they be avoided even when no alternative is available?
Other than Remdesivir, which should be avoided, the answer is not necessarily because the other drugs were not produced or developed immorally. While they may have been subsequently tested using aborted baby cell lines after-the-fact that doesn’t mean they were developed or created in an immoral fashion. Those drugs came into existence without the aid of a murdered baby.
What about medical instruments that have an ugly history?
The inventor of the speculum developed the instrument through trial and error as he operated on slave women without anesthesia. Should a conscientious doctor or patient forgo this device even though there is no alternative?
Now we address the next distinction that must be made. There is a difference between creating an instrument like a speculum in an immoral way versus how the COVID shots were developed using aborted baby cell lines. The problem with using an aborted baby cell line is that it is not a case of a one-time bad act contributing to the invention of an instrument that otherwise can be used for good. Although the cell lines derived from one aborted baby (remember baby number 293), those cells continue to be used over and over again in the production and development of new drugs like the COVID shot. The technology used allows the cells to be reproduced or rendered “immortal” so that they can be used repeatedly. It is the ill-gotten cells of the baby that continue to be exploited unlike the slave women used in Kafer’s example who no longer have any direct connection to the medical tool being used today.
What about ill-gained medical knowledge? Should findings from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Nazi hypothermia experiments be permanently erased because of the cruelty of researchers and the misery and death of their patients? What about medical knowledge gained before the passage of patient consent laws?
First of all, knowledge is intangible and the knowledge itself gained from evil experiments is not in itself evil. Government creates the legal fiction of intellectual property in order to encourage entrepreneurship, so as to avoid unscrupulous profiteering off the ideas of others who developed an idea or product. No one is stealing intellectual or any other type of property in the cases Kafer mentioned. Using good knowledge gained from bad people or bad acts is not a case of misusing or stealing property from others. On the other hand, using cell material that was ripped from the body of an innocent baby following the immoral act of murder is a case of misusing property (cell material) that belongs to someone else (the baby), and pharmaceutical companies continue to exploit that same (albeit replicated) stolen material and continue to profit off of it. Again, the connection to the abortion with the COVID shot is continuous, ongoing and direct, which is different than benefiting from a distinct and remote act in history where there is no longer a direct connection to the evil act.
If a doctor or patient eschews only one medical intervention tainted by human suffering, in this case the COVID vaccine, but shows no discomfort with other such medical treatments, are they merely being inconsistent in the application of a genuine belief or are they cloaking their refusal for other reasons in the garb of religious dissent? Frankly, it appears to be the latter.
Now Kafer questions the sincerity of religious and moral beliefs of so many people because she doesn’t understand why forcing aborted-tainted COVID drugs on unwilling participants is not the same as popping a TUMS at night. The condescension and implication of insincerity is evident and it’s the same offensive and discriminatory attitude many are enduring from their employers.
If it is the former — an inconsistently applied but genuine belief — are the plaintiffs protected by the First Amendment?
First of all, as explained above, it is not inconsistent. Secondly, if you are an employee of a public institution like a university then you do have First Amendment protections guaranteeing your liberty to exercise your faith. It is true that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment was radically undermined and practically destroyed by Justice Scalia (of all people) in the Supreme Court decision Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), but also in other prior court decisions. Yet, it was upheld in other cases and there are valid and strong constitutional arguments to make—even beyond the First Amendment. But again, the real legal question for most employees is whether employers are illegally discriminating against those with sincerely held religious, moral or ethical beliefs under Title VII—it doesn’t matter whether your employer, the government or Ms. Kafer agree with those beliefs or think they are stupid.
The U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government (and state governments through incorporation by the 14th Amendment) from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. In practice this means Jews and Muslims get access to kosher and halal meals in correctional facilities, a Catholic foster care agency can choose to work with only heterosexual couples and Mennonites can be conscientious objectors in times of war.
A person is absolutely free to believe anything but is not always free to act on that belief if that practice violates the public’s health and safety. In the 1879 Reynolds v. United States case, the Court upheld a bigamy conviction even though the Mormon man sincerely believed he should marry multiple women.
This reasoning is exactly why we need to restore Christendom. Who gets to define what constitutes public health and safety? The government does, of course. Separation of church and state is totally incompatible with a functioning free society. Kafer’s reasoning here, which sadly is a widely held idea, allows the majority to determine morality by a vote. Such a government is not rooted in God’s divine law or the natural law. It’s easy to pick on the Mormons but the same reasoning applies to Christian doctrine. It is the idea that a society can simply vote for what is moral or not regardless of revealed Truth. Again, taking the COVID shot violates both the divine and natural moral law and it doesn’t matter what Kafer or even a majority of people happen to believe.
“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself,” wrote the majority.
God’s law is superior to the civil law of the land–even the constitution. Any civil law that contradicts the divine or natural law is completely invalid and void. Even so, the law of the land applicable here, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, governs this legal question and protects those with sincerely held religious beliefs from illegal discrimination.
UCHealth has a compelling reason (FOR A VIRUS WITH A 99% SURVIVAL RATE? NOT VERY COMPELLING) to require medical personnel to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because vaccinated people are less likely to contract COVID (FALSE-HOSPITALS ARE FILLED WITH VACCINATED PEOPLE WITH COVID), less likely to spread the disease if infected (FALSE—ASK ISRAEL) or less likely to become hospitalized themselves (SHE LITERALLY HAS NO WAY OF KNOWING THIS OTHER THAN BLINDLY LISTENING TO WHAT DR. FAUCI SAYS). For these reasons, they are less likely to spread the virus to medically sensitive patients — the preemie who cannot be vaccinated or the cancer patient who though vaccinated is still at risk of a life threatening infection.
Enabling a staff member to take a religious exemption could cost a medically vulnerable person her life.
See the demonic psychology here? Anyone who does not comply with the COVID government mandate is a walking vector of death even if you never contract the virus somehow. Viral infections have been with humanity since day one. We are always carriers of potential life-threatening illnesses to other people. Kafer herself has probably carried a virus or infection that at some point killed someone else. I previously addressed the potent power of fear and how narcissists and selfish people use it to their own advantage.
In the end, the courts will decide.
Well, the courts may decide and if they follow the law, you will see massive amounts of exemptions granted. But if they don’t follow the law, it doesn’t change the morality (or lack thereof) of the COVID shot itself and no one should ever compromise their morality to comply with a dictate of the state. Unlike many others, this American won’t be compromising my soul and integrity just to pinch some incense for Caesar.
Useful Sources and additional commentary: Children of God for Life, 14 Medicines Fr. Matthew Schneider Claimed Use Aborted Fetal Cell Lines – But Do Not, Stop Pretending the COVID Jab is Morally Equivalent to Other Meds, Not so fast. The Very Misleading Article By a Priest on Drugs And Abortion Testing, Fr. Ripperger on Vaccine Morality.