Debunking AntiVax Arguments: Fetal tissue in vaccines

Most anti vaccine arguments consist of thought-stopping clichés. Basically a half-truth phrased in a way to provoke a visceral, emotional reaction. This one is no different:

Sounds scary!? The photo makes it look like "Human diploid cell" is an ingredient in the vaccine! Are doctors injecting my baby with aborted foetuses!?

When this claim is made it is usually referring to the Rubella component of the childhood MMR vaccine.

Some background on Vaccines

There are many types of vaccine: acellular, inactivated, live attenuated, toxoid, subunit etc. Source They all work in slightly different ways to produce the same result: An immune reaction in the host that will prepare the immune to either prevent the incidence of the disease it is protecting against or reduce the severity of it.

Regardless of type, the cell cultures must be grown in a medium that is favourable to the growth of the culture. For influenza, this is usually done in eggs as most influenza strains reproduce in birds. Note the culture is GROWN in eggs, the egg products are separated from the antigen material during production. No egg products are injected into the human body. Thus, people with egg allergies can have the flu vaccine without a reaction.

The very earliest 'vaccine' was for smallpox. It was found milkmaids that caught cowpox (a very mild disease) didn't catch smallpox. In the 1800s, a physician would make small cuts of the recipients arm and place a drop of blood from a cow infected with cowpox. The recipient would catch cowpox and gain immunity from smallpox. Over the years, the methods, techniques and the sophistication and safety of delivery mechanisms improved.



In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation set on a program to innoculate everyone on the planet at risk for small pox. As a result, smallpox has been eliminated and no one needs to be vaccinated against it any more - because it doesn't exist!



That is the end goal of vaccination programs everywhere. To eliminate the disease, and therefore the need to vaccinate against the disease. source

Cultivation of vaccines in animal products and live animals

Through most of the 20th century, vaccines were cultivated exclusively in animals, either by growing pathogens in live animals or by using animal cells.

Although many vaccines and anti-toxin products were successfully developed this way, using animals in vaccine development – particularly live animals – is not ideal. Research animals are costly and require extensive monitoring, both to maintain their health and to ensure the continued viability of the research. They may be carrying other bacteria or viruses that could contaminate the eventual vaccine, as with polio vaccines from the mid 20^th century that were made with monkey cells and eventually found to contain a monkey virus called SV40, or Simian Virus 40. (Fortunately, the virus was not found to be harmful to humans.) Moreover, some pathogens, such as the chickenpox virus, simply do not grow well in animal cells.

Even when vaccine development is done using animal products and not live animals – such as growing influenza vaccine viruses in chicken eggs – development can be hindered or even halted if the availability of the animal products drops. If an illness were to strike the egg-producing chickens, for example, they might produce too few eggs to be used in the development of seasonal flu vaccine, leading to a serious vaccine shortage. (It’s a common misconception that influenza vaccines could be produced more quickly if grown in cell cultures compared to using embryonated chicken eggs. In fact, growing the vaccine viruses in cell cultures would take about the same amount of time. However, cell cultures do not have the same potential availability issues as chicken eggs.)

For these and other reasons, using cell culture techniques to produce vaccine viruses in human cell strains is a significant advance in vaccine development.

It should be re-iterated here that the culture used to grow the antigen is not an ingredient of the vaccine. That's a bit like saying a frying pan is an ingredient of an omelette. So, vaccines grown in eggs, do not contain eggs; vaccines grown in duck livers, do not contain duck liver and of course, vaccines grown in human cell lines, do not contain human cells.

How do cell cultures work?

Cell cultures involve growing cells in a culture vessel. A primary cell culture consists of cells taken directly from living tissue and never subcultivated, and may contain multiple types of cells.

A cell strain is a cell culture that contains only one type of cell in which the cells are normal and have a finite capacity to replicate. Cell strains can be made by taking subcultures from an original, primary culture until only one type remains.

An immortalized cell line is a cell culture of a single type of cell that can reproduce indefinitely. Normally, cells will reproduce only a finite number of times before they cease to reproduce. However some cells in culture have undergone a mutation, or they have been manipulated in the laboratory, so that they reproduce indefinitely.

Researchers can grow human pathogens like viruses in cell strains to attenuate them – that is, to weaken them. One way viruses are adapted for use in vaccines is to alter them so that they are no longer able to grow well in the human body. This may be done by repeatedly growing the virus in a human cell strain kept at a lower temperature than normal body temperature. In order to keep replicating, the virus adapts to become better at growing at the lower temperature, thus losing its original ability to grow well and cause disease at normal body temperatures. Later, when it’s used in a vaccine and injected into a living human body at normal temperature, it still provokes an immune response but can’t replicate enough to cause illness.

So, what is WI-38?

In 1941, Australian ophthalmologist Norman Gregg first realized that congenital cataracts in babies were the result of their mothers being infected with rubella during pregnancy. Along with cataracts, it was eventually determined that congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) could also cause deafness, heart disease, encephalitis, mental retardation, and pneumonia, among many other conditions.

At the height of a rubella epidemic, it was calculated that 1% of all births at Philadelphia General Hospital were affected by congenital rubella syndrome. In some cases, women who were infected with rubella while pregnant terminated their pregnancies due to the serious risks from CRS.

Following one such abortion, the fetus was sent to Stanley Plotkin MD, at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Testing the kidney of the fetus, Plotkin found and isolated the rubella virus. Separately, Leonard Hayflick (also working at the Wistar Institute at that time) developed a cell strain called WI-38 using lung cells from an aborted fetus. Hayflick found that many viruses, including rubella, grew well in the WI-38, and he showed that it proved to be free of contaminants and safe to use for human vaccines.

Plotkin grew the rubella virus he had isolated in WI-38 cells kept at 30°C, so that it eventually grew very poorly at normal body temperature. After the virus had been grown through the cells 25 times at the lower temperature, it was no longer able to replicate enough to cause illness in a living person, but was still able to provoke a protective immune response. The rubella vaccine developed with WI-38 is still used throughout much of the world today as part of the combined MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine.

How safe and effective is the Rubella vaccine

Plotkin’s vaccine was extensivelt tested over a ten year period before being first licensed in Europe in 1970 and Australia in 1971 and was widely used with a strong safety profile and high efficacy. In light of that data, and of larger side effect profiles with the two existing animal-culture rubella vaccines, it was licensed in the United States in 1979 and  replaced the rubella vaccine component that had been previously been used for MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) combination vaccine. In 2005 the CDC declared rubella eliminated from the United States, though the threat from imported cases remains. The World Health Organization declared the Americas free from rubella in 2015. In Australia, in 2017 there were ten reported cases of rubella. In 2018, Australia was declared free from rubella. source

The efficacy of the vaccine rose due to the administration of the second booster.  The first dose of the MMR vaccine is likely to give about 96 percent of those receiving it immunity against measles, mumps and rubella. After the second dose, 99 percent of recipients are likely to be protected against all three illnesses. The third does not only increases this effectiveness, but maintains close to 90% effectiveness in middle and old age.

But what about the ethical issues?

Groups that object to abortion have raised ethical questions about Plotkin’s rubella vaccine (and other vaccines developed with similar human cell strains) over the years.

Because of its position on abortion, some members of the Catholic Church asked for its moral guidance on the use of vaccines developed using cell strains started with human fetal cells. This includes the vaccine against rubella as well as those against chickenpox and hepatitis A, and some other vaccines. The official position according to the National Catholic Bioethics Center is that individuals should, when possible, use vaccines not developed with the use of these human cell strains. However, in the case where the only vaccine available against a particular disease was developed using this approach, the NCBC notes:

One is morally free to use the vaccine regardless of its historical association with abortion. The reason is that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine. This is especially important for parents, who have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not specifically addressed the issue of using embryonic cell lines, however the Church has made several statements in support of the entire range of childhood vaccines include an ex cathedra statement from the First Presidency in 1978. The statement read in part:

“Immunization is such a simple, yet vital, matter and such a small price to pay for protection against … destroying diseases.

“Failure to act could subject untold thousands to preventable lifelong physical or mental impairment, including paralysis, blindness, deafness, heart damage, and mental retardation.

“We urge members of the Church … to protect their own children through immunization. Then they may wish to join other public-spirited citizens in efforts to eradicate ignorance and apathy that have caused the disturbingly low levels of childhood immunization.” (Reported in Ensign, July 1978, p. 79.)
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The statement was re-iterated in 1985. source

The church encourages parents to fully vaccinate their children and also funds an official worldwide initiative for childhood vaccinations.



Thus, for a Latter-day Saint, not only is there no moral excuse for refusing vaccinations, there is a strong moral requirement for parents to fully vaccinate their children given in language that is about as strong as you are ever likely to get from the First Presidency on any issue.