Students at St. John’s University Launch Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandate
“As a devout Roman Catholic, I believe life is precious.”
This lawsuit is actually about abortion, in a roundabout way.
The New York Post reports:
Students sue St. John’s University over vaccine mandate, citing ‘aborted fetal tissue’ testing
Oh, Lord.
A group of students at St. John’s University in New York is suing the Catholic school over its vaccine mandate, claiming the requirement violates their right to their religious beliefs.
The 17 plaintiffs say in their suit that they oppose abortion — and therefore do not want to take any of the three federally approved COVID-19 vaccines because the shots were tested using “aborted fetal tissue or human embryonic stem-cell derivation.”
“As a devout Roman Catholic, I believe life is precious. In the Ten Commandments, it says, `Thou Shall Not Kill,’ ” said plaintiff Kimberly Vineski, a 19-year-old, second-year pharmacy student from Glendale, LI, to The Post, referring to abortion.
St. John’s says in court papers that it won’t consider an exemption for the plaintiffs because there are questions about “the genuineness of their purported religious beliefs.”
Then there is the fact that the Catholic Church supports the immunization mandate, which it says doesn’t violate church teachings or dogma.
Still, it’s clear even the Church has wrestled with the vaccines’ testing.
In a guidance paper issued earlier this year, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded that “neither Pfizer nor Moderna used an abortion-derived cell line in the development or production of the vaccine.
“However, such a cell line was used to test the efficacy of both vaccines,” the bishops’ group acknowledged.
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Comments
I wonder how this lawsuit would fare if the vaccines were derived from pig products, and the complainants were Jews and Muslims?
(This is not a far-fetched case. Tetanus vaccine, for example, is made from horse serum.)
The problem with the support by the Bishops and Francis is that they are non ex-cathera statements as if they had the weight of ex-cathera statements. The ‘I come to church 5 times a year’ Catholics will accept those statements as such.
Those of us who regularly attend Mass do not. It’s not even that ‘for myself’ I oppose the vaccine. I chose to get it. I object, strongly, to the Church failing to recognize that presenting something that ‘cannot’ be ex-cathera, as such, is causing a rift the size of Luther’s 95 Theses, and the faithful are the ones that are considering exit in the face of what is increasingly clear failure to follow Catholic doctrine by the person holding the office of the papacy.