No, the New COVID Vaccine Is Not "Morally Compromised"
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
The approval of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has been heralded as a major advance. A single-dose vaccine that is highly efficacious at removing the ability of the virus to cause severe disease, hospitalization, and death (even in the face of variants) is nothing less than pathbreaking. Anyone who is offered this vaccine should take it. However, one group advises its adherents to preferentially request the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines instead in the quest for morally "irreproachable" vaccines.
Is this group concerned about lower numerical efficacy in clinical trials? No, it seems that they have deemed the J&J vaccine "morally compromised". The group is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and if something is "morally compromised" it is surely not the vaccine. (Notably Pope Francis has not taken such a stance).
At issue is a cell line used to manufacture the vaccine. Specifically, a cell line used to grow the adenovirus vector used in the vaccine. The purpose of the vector is to carry a genetic snippet of the coronavirus spike protein into the body, like a Trojan Horse ferrying in an enemy combatant, in order to safely trigger an immune response without any chance of causing COVID-19 itself.
It is my hope that the country's 50 million Catholics do not heed the U.S. Conference of Bishops' potentially deadly advice and instead obtain whichever vaccine is available to them as soon as possible.
The cell line of the vector, known as PER.C6, was derived from a fetus that was aborted in 1985. This cell line is prolific in biotechnology, as are other fetal-derived cell lines such as HEK-293 (human embryonic kidney), used in the manufacture of the Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Indeed, fetal cell lines are used in the manufacture of critical vaccines directed against pathogens such as hepatitis A, rubella, rabies, chickenpox, and shingles and were used to test the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (which, accordingly, the U.S. Conference of Bishops deem to only raise moral "concerns").
As such, fetal cell lines from abortions are a common and critical component of biotechnology that we all rely on to improve our health. Such cell lines have been used to help find treatments for cancer, Ebola, and many other diseases.
Dr. Andrea Gambotto, a vaccine scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, explained to Science magazine last year why fetal cells are so important to vaccine development: "Cultured [nonhuman] animal cells can produce the same proteins, but they would be decorated with different sugar molecules, which—in the case of vaccines—runs the risk of failing to evoke a robust and specific immune response." Thus, the fetal cells' human origins are key to their effectiveness.
So why the opposition to this life-saving technology, especially in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in over a century? How could such a technology be "morally compromised" when morality, as I understand it, is a code of values to guide human life on Earth with the purpose of enhancing well-being?
By any measure, the J&J vaccine accomplishes that, since human life, not embryonic or fetal life, is the standard of value. An embryo or fetus in the earlier stages of development, while harboring the potential to grow into a human being, is not the moral equivalent of a person. Thus, creating life-saving medical technology using cells that would have otherwise been destroyed is not in conflict with a proper moral code. To me, it is nihilistic to oppose these vaccines on the grounds cited by the U.S. Conference of Bishops.
Reason, the rational faculty, is the human means of knowledge. It is what one should wield when approaching a scientific or health issue. Appeals from clerics, devoid of any need to tether their principles to this world, should not have any bearing on one's medical decision-making.
In the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church opposed all forms of scientific inquiry, even castigating science and curiosity as the "lust of the eyes": One early Middle Ages church father reveled in his rejection of reality and evidence, proudly declaring, "I believe because it is absurd." This organization, which tyrannized scientists such as Galileo and murdered the Italian cosmologist Bruno, today has shown itself to still harbor anti-science sentiments in its ranks.
It is my hope that the country's 50 million Catholics do not heed the U.S. Conference of Bishops' potentially deadly advice and instead obtain whichever vaccine is available to them as soon as possible. When judged using the correct standard of value, vaccines using fetal cell lines in their development are an unequivocal good -- while those who attempt to undermine them deserve a different category altogether.
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.
“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.
Over the next several years, Savannah’s seizures continued and worsened. By age five Savannah was having seizures dozens of times each day, and her parents noticed significant developmental delays. Savannah was unable to use the restroom and functioned more like a toddler than a five-year-old.
Doctors were mystified: Tracy and her husband had no family history of seizures, and there was no event—such as an injury or infection—that could have caused them. Doctors were also confused as to why Savannah’s seizures were happening so frequently despite trying different seizure medications.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Savannah with Lennox-Gaustaut Syndrome, or LGS, an epilepsy disorder with no cure and a poor prognosis. People with LGS are often resistant to several kinds of anti-seizure medications, and often suffer from developmental delays and behavioral problems. People with LGS also have a higher chance of injury as well as a higher chance of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) due to the frequent seizures. In about 70 percent of cases, LGS has an identifiable cause such as a brain injury or genetic syndrome. In about 30 percent of cases, however, the cause is unknown.
Watching her daughter struggle through repeated seizures was devastating to Tracy and the rest of the family.
“This disease, it comes into your life. It’s uninvited. It’s unannounced and it takes over every aspect of your daily life,” said Tracy in an interview with Today.com. “Plus it’s attacking the thing that is most precious to you—your kid.”
Desperate to find some answers, Tracy began combing the medical literature for information about epilepsy and LGS. She enrolled in college courses to better understand the papers she was reading.
“Ironically, I thought I needed to go to college to take English classes to understand these papers—but soon learned it wasn’t English classes I needed, It was science,” Tracy said. When she took her first college science course, Tracy says, she “fell in love with the subject.”
Tracy was now a caregiver to Savannah, who continued to have hundreds of seizures a month, as well as a full-time student, studying late into the night and while her kids were at school, using classwork as “an outlet for the pain.”
“I couldn’t help my daughter,” Tracy said. “Studying was something I could do.”
Twelve years later, Tracy had earned a PhD in neurobiology.
After her post-doctoral training, Tracy started working at a lab that explored the genetics of epilepsy. Savannah’s doctors hadn’t found a genetic cause for her seizures, so Tracy decided to sequence her genome again to check for other abnormalities—and what she found was life-changing.
Tracy discovered that Savannah had a calcium channel mutation, meaning that too much calcium was passing through Savannah’s neural pathways, leading to seizures. The information made sense to Tracy: Anti-seizure medications often leech calcium from a person’s bones. When doctors had prescribed Savannah calcium supplements in the past to counteract these effects, her seizures had gotten worse every time she took the medication. Tracy took her discovery to Savannah’s doctor, who agreed to prescribe her a calcium blocker.
The change in Savannah was almost immediate.
Within two weeks, Savannah’s seizures had decreased by 95 percent. Once on a daily seven-drug regimen, she was soon weaned to just four, and then three. Amazingly, Tracy started to notice changes in Savannah’s personality and development, too.
“She just exploded in her personality and her talking and her walking and her potty training and oh my gosh she is just so sassy,” Tracy said in an interview.
Since starting the calcium blocker eleven years ago, Savannah has continued to make enormous strides. Though still unable to read or write, Savannah enjoys puzzles and social media. She’s “obsessed” with boys, says Tracy. And while Tracy suspects she’ll never be able to live independently, she and her daughter can now share more “normal” moments—something she never anticipated at the start of Savannah’s journey with LGS. While preparing for an event, Savannah helped Tracy get ready.
“We picked out a dress and it was the first time in our lives that we did something normal as a mother and a daughter,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
A sleek, four-foot tall white robot glides across a cafe storefront in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, holding a two-tiered serving tray full of tea sandwiches and pastries. The cafe’s patrons smile and say thanks as they take the tray—but it’s not the robot they’re thanking. Instead, the patrons are talking to the person controlling the robot—a restaurant employee who operates the avatar from the comfort of their home.
It’s a typical scene at DAWN, short for Diverse Avatar Working Network—a cafe that launched in Tokyo six years ago as an experimental pop-up and quickly became an overnight success. Today, the cafe is a permanent fixture in Nihonbashi, staffing roughly 60 remote workers who control the robots remotely and communicate to customers via a built-in microphone.
More than just a creative idea, however, DAWN is being hailed as a life-changing opportunity. The workers who control the robots remotely (known as “pilots”) all have disabilities that limit their ability to move around freely and travel outside their homes. Worldwide, an estimated 16 percent of the global population lives with a significant disability—and according to the World Health Organization, these disabilities give rise to other problems, such as exclusion from education, unemployment, and poverty.
These are all problems that Kentaro Yoshifuji, founder and CEO of Ory Laboratory, which supplies the robot servers at DAWN, is looking to correct. Yoshifuji, who was bedridden for several years in high school due to an undisclosed health problem, launched the company to help enable people who are house-bound or bedridden to more fully participate in society, as well as end the loneliness, isolation, and feelings of worthlessness that can sometimes go hand-in-hand with being disabled.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that [people with disabilities] feel they are a burden to society, or that they fear their families suffer by caring for them,” said Yoshifuji in an interview in 2020. “We are dedicating ourselves to providing workable, technology-based solutions. That is our purpose.”
Shota Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy. Ory Labs, Inc.
Wanting to connect with others and feel useful is a common sentiment that’s shared by the workers at DAWN. Marianne, a mother of two who lives near Mt. Fuji, Japan, is functionally disabled due to chronic pain and fatigue. Working at DAWN has allowed Marianne to provide for her family as well as help alleviate her loneliness and grief.Shota, Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy, agrees. "There are many difficulties in my daily life, but I believe my life has a purpose and is not being wasted," he says. "Being useful, able to help other people, even feeling needed by others, is so motivational."