This week on The Open Door we discuss ethical concerns about the new COVID-19 vaccines. We welcome two special guests. Stacy Trasancos, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of St. Philip Institute in Tyler, Texas. Melissa Moschella is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She is also a visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation's Simon Center for American Studies Both have recently written on ethics and the new vaccines.

1. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a note on the morality of using some anti-COVID-19 vaccines. Could each of you comment on its principles?

a. “[I]n cases where cells from aborted fetuses are employed to create cell lines for use in scientific research, ‘there exist differing degrees of responsibility’ of cooperation in evil.

b. “[W]hen ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available…it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.”

c. “The fundamental reason for considering the use of these vaccines morally licit is that the kind of cooperation in evil (passive material cooperation) in the procured abortion from which these cell lines originate is, on the part of those making use of the resulting vaccines, remote. The moral duty to avoid such passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is a grave danger, such as the otherwise uncontainable spread of a serious pathological agent—in this case, the pandemic spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.”

d. “T]he licit use of such vaccines does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.”

e. “[The] vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”

2. Do the secular media and political leaders understand and acknowledge the qualifications built into the CDF principles?

3. To what extent do the Catholic faithful understand these principles?

4. In light of the gravity of the issues involved, might some Catholics as a matter of personal witness decide against taking the current vaccines?

5. Material cooperation in evil is wide-ranging and hard to escape, as Dorothy Day candidly noted. But often such cooperation is less remote than would be the use of the new vaccines. So we might conclude that using the vaccines is surely legitimate. Or might we, alternatively, conclude that we should rethink our ongoing “everyday” material cooperation?

6. Kevin L. Flannery, SJ, recently wrote the well-received Cooperation With Evil: Thomistic Tools of Analysis (The Catholic University of America Press, 2019). He urges caution in using the distinction between formal and material cooperation and argues that “More reliable tools in the analysis of cooperation can be found in… Thomas Aquinas’s moral theory.” What thoughts do you have on the formal vs. material distinction?