If you ask foreign visitors what strikes them about the United States, many will say the variety, the choices, the endless options in everything. There are five brands of toothpaste in the supermarket and five choices per brand. As Sen. Bernie Sanders once lamented, we have “a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants.”
And now, we’ve got options in the coronavirus vaccine, and this is causing anxiety for some.
With the Food and Drug Administration’s approval in late February of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, there are now three vaccines against the coronavirus, all with different traits, different reported efficacy, and different ethical implications. Once again, the country faces the possibility of options.
Do you want to go with Pfizer and Moderna, the messenger RNA vaccines? Vaccines using mRNA technology have not been FDA-approved before, and while these vaccines have undergone clinical tests and have now been administered to nearly 200 million people worldwide, there will always be those who fear the long-term effects of something so new.
Also, Pfizer and Moderna require two shots, leaving people with a good reason to prefer the one-and-done Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Not so fast, though. There’s plenty of scuttlebutt at the school parking lot and on Facebook about Johnson & Johnson being less effective. If you rely on the headline numbers, it looks that way. Pfizer and Moderna report 95% efficacy at preventing illness, while Johnson & Johnson reports only 66%. That apparent gap is probably misleading, though, for a couple of reasons. First, Johnson & Johnson reports 100% efficacy at preventing hospitalization and death; second, experts say Johnson & Johnson was tested in a more difficult environment than the mRNA vaccines because more variants were present in the test population.
There’s another consideration in this choice, though, and America’s Catholic bishops are speaking up about it: the ethics.
All three vaccines have what Catholic ethicists would call a “remote” and merely “material” connection to abortion. The connection is more immediate for Johnson & Johnson, though, which used cells derived from an aborted baby to manufacture the vaccine. Pfizer and Moderna used such cells only for confirmatory testing. (None of the vaccines have these aborted-baby cells in them.)
Creating a vaccine using the baby’s cells cannot justify aborting the child, but using the cells after the abortion doesn’t make you complicit in the abortion itself. Yet given the option, the bishops argue, it’s best to stay morally as far away from that abortion as possible. That’s why the bishops say that one should opt against Johnson & Johnson if there’s a choice.
In this world of endless choices, nothing is ever simple.
