James Sherley: Should Pro-Lifers Take the COVID Vaccines?

And are statistically indistinguishable…

Well, the J&J vaccine has statistically distinguishable efficacy from the other two, and it also has a single dose rather than multiple dose, and it does not require aggressive refrigeration. Those are all significant differences.

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I strongly disagree, because it was tested against significantly different viral populations than the first two. To test that hypothesis, you’d need to do a study with matched controls.

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I might think the pro-life movement would like most to think there is no grey area. But there always are.

There are clearly a range of opinions. Conclusions will vary depending on the relative priorities one assigns to the many different facets involved. Some will tend to one extreme while others will balance the factors differently. Also, with vaccines, this is actually distinct from a moral position on the act of abortion. It’s about what one can or should do with the products of abortion. And there we see significant nuance, such as whether the intent of the abortion was to provide cells to advance science or obtain some profit or if the derived cell lines were not a motivating factor behind the abortion.

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Perhaps you haven’t see the subpopulation analysis that is essentially a population matched control :slight_smile:

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Subpopulations of what? Virus or people?

People. Remember that the Pfizer trial includes people in South Africa.

I’m aware of that, thanks, but what I mean is that the vaccines have been tested against different virus populations. The virus population is evolving.

Yes, it has been tested on the new strains. The trial continues, and new data. Was just released.

Do you mean the Pfizer press release, which for South Africa is:

South Africa, where the B.1.351 lineage is prevalent and 800 participants were enrolled, nine cases of COVID-19 were observed, all in the placebo group, indicating vaccine efficacy of 100% (95% CI, [53.5, 100.0])

How is that efficacy statistically different from J&J’s in SA?

J&J’s did not have 100% efficacy there. Though you are correct if you mean the difference is not statistically significant at 95%.

That’s what I mean. I suspect it’s not even different at 50%!

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Not to downplay the ethical knots of human cell lines, but the vaccine is a gift of life.

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Thanks for tuning in (@Rumraket ), what did you think?

It was interesting but short. It got a bit muddled with the discussion around the possibility of vaccination becoming mandatory (which it isn’t anywhere in the US afaik).

I can’t really evaluate Dr. Sherley’s position because I haven’t looked into the specific claims he made, such as whether it would be easy for vaccine producers to switch to testing vaccines on cells other than HEK cells that supposedly are just as good at whatever it is they’re specifically used for(I don’t know). But I can see a few potential simplifications in his statement that might not bear out in reality.

Supposing at least for the sake of argument that there’s another cell line not derived from an elective abortion, which would be just as effective as HEK cells in vaccine development, I’m still not sure it’s as simple and easy as Dr. Sherley made it seem to just ask (much less demand) of vaccine producers to switch. You might hypothetically end up in a situation where manufacturers have produced a large batch of vaccine which pro-life people then decide to opt out of because they’ve been told another batch might be coming in the future which has been developed using another cell-line. Which can significantly delay any vaccination program.
There are some logistical and communications-issues around this that has the potential to turn into a total cesspool.

Ultimately I don’t find the “pro-life” position on the use of HEK cells in developing vaccines coherent, to be perfectly honest. I don’t think letting yourself get vaccinated with a vaccine that was developed using a cell-line derived from the kidneys of an elective abortion in any way constitutes an endorsement or approval of that abortion having taken place. It would not change anything about the abortion having taken place, and no additional lives are taken and nobody else are made to suffer or commit ethical or moral or physical crimes now after the fact of that abortion just because those cells are still in use.

The past has already happened, and I don’t mean to be callous but apparently some good has come of it. Those cells now still exist, they help save lives. That does not mean that pro-life people are forced to agree that abortion should have taken place, if we could somehow travel back in time and prevent it. But reality is just not as simple as the presumptive pro-life position is sometimes presented as. Some times there is a painful moral arithmetic you have to take into account.

In this situation someone sent the trolley down the tracks on purpose and it ran over another person(from the perspective of a pro-life person) and it has already happened and you can’t go back and change that. But you now have the opportunity to stop it, in which case more people might die in the future, or let it keep going but allow it to actually save lives. You don’t have to agree with whoever sent that trolley moving “with intent to kill someone”, to understand that if you let it keep rolling it actually saves lives, and it doesn’t do that by killing a few to save many more, it’s stopped killing entirely. But if you let it keep going it actually saves lives.

And I don’t buy into any argument that to allow that cell-line continued use, you’re somehow implicitly endorsing or allowing abortion.

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Wow, this was taken down for violating YouTube’s content guidelines and posting “false claims” about COVID vaccines. What nonsense.

Depends on whether there was disinformation. Covid is a particularly sensitive subject. Historically, Sherley tends torward extreme opposition on the subject of embryonically derived cell lines. I think that does influence his claims about the actual state of the science and the cost of change.

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Of course. Except we were fact checking disinformation, pointing out that fetal cells are not part of the vaccine. That’s entirely aligned with the consensus!

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