People are living through something like a slow-motion earthquake. It will be some time before we emerge from the rubble and can adequately calculate the damage to our nation’s health, economy, and social fabric. In the meantime, average citizens are busy trying to figure out how best to protect their families. Some Democratic politicians, however, are exploiting the crisis, trying to reverse a recent ban on tax-funded experiments using the flesh of aborted fetuses. Their claim: Developing a vaccine against COVID-19 depends on this type of morally tainted research. The scientific truth? Ethical experimental alternatives abound, including the use of monkey cells, adult human cells, and chicken eggs. And these alternatives work as well as, if not better than, fetal tissue for the production of vaccines.

Modern vaccine science long ago moved beyond the need for aborted fetal tissue. Some scientific background explains why. To create a vaccine, samples of the actual virus are grown and altered to produce a weakened strain. The weakened strain is then injected into the body to produce an antibody response. This enables the body to fight off the actual disease upon exposure to the virus. To grow and alter the virus in a laboratory, researchers use a cell culture. Yes, those cells can come from aborted human babies, but they can also from monkey, chicken, or rabbit embryos — or even from adult humans.