Every since reading Dr. Mattai's article, I've been wondering about the liceity of mandatory vaccinations.
I remember as a kid that vaccinations in public school were required and when I attended St.Mary's Academy it was a condition of acceptance.
I found in this article (link) that all 50 US states have mandatory vaccination regulations for school children.
However, the question is one of morality? Is it morally licit to require a medical treatment for a healthy person? This article link has some insights about the history and reasons for concern.
I went digging into my moral theology texts and, sadly, there were [no] references to mandatory vaccinations. However, in discussing forced sterilizations, I may have found a relevant principle in Casti Casti Connubii (Pius XI):
"Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects. Therefore where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason. St. Thomas teaches this when, inquiring whether human judges for the sake of preventing future evils can inflict punishment, he admits that the power indeed exists as regards certain other forms of punishment, but justly and properly denies it as regards the maiming of the body." (Source: Moral Theology, by John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan)
So the principle is that the state wields no direct power over the bodies of the governed. So ... trying to apply this here - it seems that mandatory vaccinations would be illicit.
Looking further I found the following:
2304. Refusal of Medicine or Hygienic Care.--(a) If there is a sufficient reason for this conduct, no sin is committed. There may be sufficient reasons of a natural kind (e.g., that the remedies are harmful or useless or too expensive), or of a supernatural kind (e.g., St. Agatha refused all medicines because God Himself was her physician, certain Saints were divinely inspired to make no effort to remove bodily maladies on account of the spiritual profit derived from them). (b) If there is no sufficient reason for this conduct, it is sinful. Thus, one sins against faith, if the reason for the conduct is disbelief in the existence of evil (e.g., Christian Science or Eddyism attributes sickness and pain to imagination, and says that the only cure is "faith"); one sins by temptation of God, if the reason for the conduct is vain expectation of miracles; one is guilty of suicide or homicide, if the purpose is to end life, etc.I wonder what would constitute sufficient reason for declining to be vaccinated.
“It is evident, in the light of practical reason, that the vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and must therefore be voluntary.” However, these words were later added: “In all cases, from an ethical standpoint, the morality of the vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also pursuance of the common good. If there is no other means of halting, or merely preventing, the epidemic, it is good to permit recommendation of vaccination, in particular to protect those who are weakest and more exposed. Those who at any rate, for reasons of conscience, refuse vac-cines produced with cell lines derived from aborted foetuses, must strive to avoid, through prophylactic methods and appropriate behav-iour, becoming vehicles for transmission of the infective agent. In particular they should avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for clinical or other reasons, and the most vulnerable persons” (section 5). (Source CDF Note on the Morality of using some Covid-19 vaccines)
So what we have is the following:
- A vaccination is a medical treatment.
- It is morally licit to voluntarily be vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines.
- It would be illicit be forced to do so.
- Just because it isn't morally licit doesn't mean that some governments won't pass laws to the contrary.
Dr. Mattai takes an opposing view calling this a 'liberal argument'. Perhaps, but for now I'll stick with the CDF on this one :-)
P^3
Postscript and some Articles
By the way here's the best summary I've seen to date on the points for the use of morally tainted vaccines:
Acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccines developed, researched, or tested utilizing fetal cell lines is morally permissible when no alternative COVID-19 vaccine is available or accessible.
Acceptance of these COVID-19 vaccine involves very remote material cooperation in the twofold evils of the abortions of the fetuses from whom tissue was posthumously taken to derive cell strains for medical research.
An action that involves remote cooperation in evil is permissible, or even encouraged, when there are grave moral reasons that are proportional to or outweigh moral badness of this cooperation.
The proportional moral reasons for acceptance of the vaccine are the promotion of community health and prevention of serious risk of harm, which are grounded in the fundamental moral and social principle of the common good.
It is permissible to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, but those who refuse should perform additional actions that promote community health and prevention of serious harm.
While accepting the vaccine is a morally responsible action, recipients nonetheless have an obligation to protest the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development.
https://www.immunize.org/talking-about-vaccines/furtonarticle.pdf
https://www.cacatholic.org/CCC-vaccine-moral-acceptability
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