*TRIGGER WARNING* This post mentions the topic of abortion
We are currently in the midst of one of the worst pandemics since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 2.78 million people worldwide as of March 2021 and has caused economic disruption akin to that of the 2008 financial crisis. However, many would agree that COVID-19 is not the only pandemic we are experiencing at the moment; there is also a pandemic of misinformation. If left unchecked, this pandemic has the potential to be just as dangerous as the virus itself.
Misinformation surrounding vaccines, their ingredients and their side effects are nothing new. Many will remember the story of Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor and one of the first prominent figures in the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement, who claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused autism in children, claims made based upon falsified experimental data. His claims were quickly disproven and his medical licence revoked, but it was too late and the damage was done. Many parents chose not to vaccinate their children against these deadly diseases due to his misinformation, forgetting that the MMR vaccine is the reason that measles, mumps and rubella had been all but eradicated in western countries. As a result, the UK has now lost it’s ‘measles-free’ status as the virus, one of the most contagious viruses known, is on the rise again due to low uptake of MMR vaccine and the number of mumps cases in England is at the highest levels in a decade. This is dangerous not only for the children whose parents choose not to get vaccinated and who are now at risk of contracting viruses that used to be some of the biggest causes of child mortality before the vaccine, but also the children who, for medical reasons, cannot receive the vaccine.
If misconceptions about the COVID vaccine are allowed to thrive, we run the same risk of undermining the efforts to eradicate the disease, as for vaccines to truly work, 95% of the population ideally should receive the vaccine. One of the most common misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine is that it contains cells from an aborted foetus, which is simply untrue.
The theory may have arose after it was reported that AstraZeneca had used a cell line called HEK293 in their COVID-19 vaccine development process. A cell line is a group of cells that have been cloned from one single cell in order to do experiments on it. The original cell from the HEK293 line did indeed come from an aborted foetus, as the cells in the early stages of development are special cells that can develop into any type of cell, for example a heart cell, a lung cell or a skin cell. Also, the HEK293 cells that we use now are very distant decendents from the original cell from the 1970s.
Understandably, some people may see the words HEK293 and vaccine in the same sentence and assume that this means that the vaccine CONTAINS these cells. This, however, is not the case. The HEK293 cells are NOT in the final product. They were simply used to grow the viral vectors needed for the vaccine.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is a viral vector vaccine, meaning that they essentially 'hide' the genetic material of COVID-19 that we want our immune systems to see inside a modified and non-dangerous cold virus that they then inject you with. The modified virus that they use is called an adenovirus and it comes from chimpanzees. The adenovirus is genetically modified to make sure that it cannot cause disease in humans. The advantage to this is that the modified adenoviruses that contain COVID-19 genetic information will be able to infect your cells (but not make you sick!) and tell them to make the COVID-19 antigens (which allow your body to start an immune response against COVID-19 that will result in a level of immunity). Your body will then destroy the adenovirus just like it would any other virus, but the protection that the vaccine gives you will remain.
Scientists acquire the adenoviruses that they modify for the vaccine by growing them in a lab. The quickest way to grow the volume of cells needed to mass produce the vaccines is to use HEK293 cells to grow the adenoviruses in. These cells are ideal because they can rapidly multiply the modified adenovirus. once fully grown, the adenovirus is then REMOVED from the HEK293 cell culture and is then used for the vaccine, meaning that the final vaccine does not contain the HEK293 cells.
This is not the first time that HEK293 cells have been used in vaccine development either. Ervebo, the vaccine for Ebola that was deployed during the 2018 outbreak and helped bring it to an end, was also grown in HEK293 cells. No pharmaceutical company would ever get approval to include these cells in the vaccine, firstly because they are completely unnecessary for the vaccine, and secondly because it can be extremely dangerous to inject humans with other human substances or cells.
I hope this post has cleared up one of the most common misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccinations, and I encourage you all to truly fact check anything you read about the vaccines, as this is an example of how information can get twisted into dangerous lies in the age of social media.
Bottom Line: The vaccine does NOT contain aborted foetuses
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