In Rome, on October the 23^rd, 2021, H.E. Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk (H.E.) held a talk at the Voice of the Family’s conference “Health of the sick and salvation of souls – Church and society in this dark hour of history” about the ethical questions related to the Covid-19 vaccines. (Link to the talk here).

As this topic is, for obvious reasons, a very hot subject, we deem paramount here in “CroceVia” to discuss it in the good old spirit of scholastic fashion of the Disputatio.

The structure given by H.E. to his presentation is the following:

• A recall of what are the basic ethical questions establishing their list.
• (b1) Inspecting if these vaccines are effective and (b2) safe also looking at what is (b3) their death rate and possible serious collateral effects.
• (c1) A recall of the issue of using aborted infants for the design, development, production, and test of the currently available vaccine, followed by (c2) a recall of the principles of cooperation with evil
• Some conclusive thoughts about the rightfulness, or lack of, of governments to force the vaccination on their citizens

Though it can seem just a formal detail, the way a presentation is structured impacts directly the fashion about how the reasoning itself is executed: we continue to sustain that we must absolutely separate the ethical questions per se, like the cooperation with evil, from the consequent ethical practical considerations and application in given, specific circumstances.

Hence, we will first debate about the point (c2) as we do not think, and we already expressed it previously (here), that the usual way to present the issue of cooperating with evil has been evaluated in its completeness.

In a second step we will consider how (c1) must be handled in this context.

We will then have a couple of reflections about the point (d) and more particularly the point of view of a catholic citizen as such.

The fourth point is about the point (b) as they are just circumstantial considerations which do relate to the sole prudential dimension of the problem applicable if, and only if, we do not have sinful cooperation with evil: we will introduce here the concept “cognitive anisometropic amblyopia”, which induces to considerations which lack of universality.

Cooperation with evil

Without any doubt, we can only agree, and for the same reasons, with H.E.’s claim that “Contemporary Catholics, who accept the Church’s teaching on intrinsic evil, therefore, often do not know about them» and this explains why there is not a common agreement between pastors and scholars about this specific topic, yet.

There are four levels of consideration when one does examine the cooperation with any kind of act, and this is often totally overlooked in all the stances which have been expressed:

• An act is always aimed at an end, which is its cause, the reason of this enactment: participating to this cause can be, in moral considerations, either “formal”, i.e., with the lucid intention to have it happen, or “material” if an act of participation to said cause is not wanted as such.
• We must now recall that we have four causes which are all explicitly concurrent in ethical considerations: the material cause, the formal one, the efficient and the final one. During all these discussions currently, modern theologians and philosophers do limit themselves to the first two, omitting the instrumental dimension, which is like considering various intermediate acts aimed at their specific ends, and omitting the final cause, which does encompass all the intermediate ones and resumes also the formal and the material causality.
• There is the dimension of direct or indirect participation to an act and finally
• There is the remoteness or on the contrary the proximity of a given participation to an act.

A sound ethical analysis does not start with looking at the instrumental causes but is always about looking at the big picture as the final cause, the one, thanks to which, the other three causes are put in motion.

It is a matter of logic and of method: if the final cause is not ethical even the most ethical usage of instrumental causes will not be justifying that end.

If to steal a bank I need to do a hole in a wall, but I do this hole with all my good skills of mason and artist, will this make my act of robbery become a good act? Could that even be a mitigation factor or, in the opposite, is it even an aggravating circumstance, as valuable skills have been submitted to the service of a bad cause?

When Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, cited by H.E.  states (here) that “The fundamental reason for considering the use of these vaccines morally licit is that the kind of cooperation in evil (passive material cooperation) in the procured abortion from which these cell lines originate is, on the part of those making use of the resulting vaccines, remote”, it is simply looking at one of the instrumental cause: the patients who use these vaccines have, obviously, never wanted to participate to these abortions, so their participation could only be material and surely not formal; it is also clear, specifically in relationship to the act of getting inoculated by vaccines or sera, that they do participate only indirectly as material cause; and, finally, it assesses that this happened remotely, in the odd ontological and ethical sense of time remoteness, which is per se an erroneous ethical category in its causality consideration as these current vaccines and the genic sera used could not have existed without these previous abortions, which makes them, from a sheer causality point of view, very proximate acts.

This is cutting ethical corners: before looking at this level of detail at the instrumental causality point of view, we must look and discuss the big picture, i.e., the final cause of the whole vaccine/sera production.

And here we lack completely of even the beginning of the start of a reflection: everybody is trying to understand if the people who acted as fences after the robbery of the bank did participate formally or materially, directly or indirectly, in a proximate or remote fashion to the digging of the holes in the bank’s walls and not if they simply did participate to the causa prima which is the worthiness itself of robbing a bank because there are fences who will make it worth it!

The ethical dilemma about the current vaccines and experimental sera used against the current pandemic is to know if their business model, currently based on abortions’ byproducts and industrial processes, could have been successful without the participation of patients-customers eager to buy them: i.e., without the formal participation of these last ones to the causa prima of the pharmaceutical companies.

At this level, the consumers perfectly understand that the more they buy products and services of a company, the more they do participate in its financial success, not only, but also to its business model success. It is obvious that the cooperation to the causa prima of the company is always formal for a consumer.

If the business model of a company is to dig holes in banks walls so that it is possible to rob safes’ contents and resell them, as a fence for these products I do plenty foster that business model and the business owners and their employees and managers of said company will simply improve the technicity and the efficiency of their successful methodologies.

By purchasing, directly or through the state, products issued from the usage of abortion we simply validate the business model of this pharma, not only, but we give them further financial means to continue in the future along such a successful direction, helping to destroy and, anyway, to make even more difficult for other companies who would have liked more ethical approaches: to positively cooperate to this process is for any catholic worth his denomination something impossible to even consider.

There is a quite large academic bibliography available about the phenomena linked to boycotting, i.e., refusing to buy a product which origins are considered unethical by a group or person and to “buycotting” which is the volunteer choice to buy specifically a kind of product which is deemed related to higher ethical and quality standards.

For a catholic, being he the Pope or just simply ourselves, it is a moral obligation not to participate formally in any business model which is based on unethical grounds, hence, to boycott these, and at the same to actively favor, i.e., “buycott“, these business activities which are ethically sound.

Now, thanks to the lack of ethical depth and, particularly, understanding of business ethics by the people who pronounced their advice on this matter, this dimension has been totally overlooked and the “official” catholic world has practically ended up boycotting ethical ways to cure and to develop vaccines and sera without any impairment with abortion in their business model and “buycotting“, instead, the ethically worst available possible choices.

And we all know dozens and hundred of examples of people who do boycott businesses related to the mafia, related to children’s exploitation, to palm oil-related deforestation, to sweatshops as well as there are also examples of people “buycotting” guaranteed fair trade products, organically grown or CO2 neutral products: this concept of formal participation to the causa prima of the business as a consumer it’s been in the air for decades.

Can you just imagine the magnificent blow that would have caused to abortion’s movement if the Catholic Church would have said, OK for vaccines, but only for ethical vaccines: all catholic must accept only ethically proven vaccines. i.e., 1.3 billion fewer consumers: this would have meant that these companies would have had to change their business model, starting from R&D, Testing, and Production for the future and for the present. Instead of that, the Catholic official world is continuing to finance and objectively support that unethical industry.

Cognitive anisometropic amblyopia leading to monovision

When one eye sees well only from near and the other only from far away, in the end, the brain can’t cope and the whole thing results in a mono-vision, i.e., looking only from near or only from far away, losing all sense of perspectives.

This happens also when we deal with knowledge and data: there are people who understand very well specialized data and have a more general understanding of things on the other side, but they cannot make the correct link between said data and the whole picture and end up with biased understanding and erroneous conclusions.

H.E. involuntarily gives us a typical example of this anisometropic amblyopia leading to very specific monovision about the meaning of the data he cites during his otherwise interesting conference when he tries to analyze the prudential dimension of the usage or current vaccines and experimental sera against the Covid.

Of course, and it could not be, ontologically, different as nobody knows the future, he tries to understand what the negative known short term side effects at the date of his conference are and tries to deduct, along with the mainstream official narrative, that it is statistically worth being vaccinated.

He starts with recalling the general effectiveness of the vaccines citing the results for the ones most known in the Western world, and he shows that the immediate collateral effects are huge in terms of percentages of people who get jabbed depending on the vaccine used though feeble in their intensity.

He then looks at the most serious side effects which hit 0.1% to 1% of the people getting the experimental sera and he shows a table with TTS cases (thrombosis thrombocytopenia syndrome) where we see it can affect essentially younger people and mainly females at a 0,0012% level in some extreme cases.

H.E. ends up citing “a nationwide research project in Israel turned out on average to be 2.7 cases in 100,000 people. On the other hand, the possibility of getting myocarditis by Covid-19 is substantially higher, i.e., 11 per 100,000.”

These useful data must now be connected to what the Covid does and here there is a full paragraph that makes a list of how bad can be the covid for who gets it, but no direct comparison is made between the effect of the experimental sera and the covid itself: it is then difficult without a thorough analysis and comparison to establish rational parallelism and get the correct analogies.

But we can retain that some of these experimental sera are valid from 60 to 90% from the day of their administration down to 30-35% six months later according to the Israeli studies which imply the need for a third jab and in the future probably of additional jabs regularly.

The real question is not so much a question to know if the inoculation of these experimental sera has per se so many secondary effects and does guarantee alleviated effects in case one patient gets the covid (it is now generally accepted that these “vaccine” strategy does not stop the diffusion of the coronavirus) but to know if these patients risk more or less than unvaccinated people in general.

The question which is never discussed is to know if it is better to stay unvaccinated from a prudential point of view or not: in other words, if I take the citizen XYZ and this person is currently unvaccinated and not sick, what is the percentage of chance that he/she will get these horrible side effects either from a vaccine or from the sickness directly itself?

XYZ can choose to be immediately exposed to the side effects of the experimental sera (short, medium, and long term) or to wait to be “naturally” contaminated by the coronavirus and be exposed to its objectively vicious effects.

In the first case, he will immediately get the vaccines’ side effects described by H.E. according to his statistics, in the second case he will have to wait for the contamination.

As we have seen that the effect of the sera is mainly effective along a period of six months, the question becomes very precise: for example, what is the probability for XYZ to be dead in the function of age sex, etc. out of the “natural” Covid19 sickness compared to all side effects, included the naughty ones described above if he decides to be immediately jabbed.

We can use the data of Worldometer to have an idea: on a worldwide population of, say, 7.5 billion inhabitants since the start of the pandemics officially 19 months ago (roughly 570 days ago) we got as for today November the 4th 2021, 248,961,251 cases of Covid-19 and 5,039,825 deaths.

This means that 0.03319% of inhabitants of this planet caught this sickness in 570 days (i.e., a current 0.000058% daily probability to catch it or over a period of six months 0.0108% to catch it) or, other words 0.0067% died because of this sickness (i.e. a current daily probability of 0.000018% to die out of covid, or over a period of 6 months a probability of 0.0021%).

To understand and get back to perspective out from monovision, just using the Israeli numbers cited by H.E. only for the cases of myocarditis of “2.7 cases in 100,000 vaccinated people against 11 cases in 100,000 for not vaccinated people”  and knowing that out of 100,000 unvaccinated people only 0.0108% will be sick, i.e. 10.8 people and out of these ones 11 cases out 100,000 will get this myocarditis i.e. 0.001188 people, it is clear that one risks 2,272 times more to have that myocarditis getting jabbed than waiting to be sick during the next six months!

Of course, this calculation should be made side effect per side effect, and not only for the myocarditis like we have done here, per age and sex categories and per country, but nonetheless, it means that the assertions of H.E. about the prudential necessity to get these sera inoculated if far from being something universal.

Hence, we must disagree with his conclusions and consider that it is not prudent, yet, to use these experimental sera massively for the whole population because even their very first side effects are overwhelmingly more dangerous statistically speaking when we consider the actual spread of the pandemics.

Conclusion

The Covid 19 pandemic has been and still is a challenge for humanity also beyond its dangerous effects for who catches it, but mainly because we have seen the birth of narratives which have seen colluded the political and the religious powers to control population, behaviors, much beyond what virtuous wisdom and meaningful ethics would require.

We have seen the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and their theologian and moralists lose completely common sense and perspective coming to the point to advise and, in some cases, even to oblige, like in the case of the Vatican’s employees, to participate with the evil of a business system which pushes for abortion as an economic paradigm, missing a historic opportunity to durably influence the pharma industry to get rid of these intrinsically unethical practices.

In Pace

Categories: Attualità cattolica, English Articles, Filosofia, teologia e apologetica, Magistero, Simon de Cyrène