A few days ago, an article was floating about on Facebook with a headline proclaiming that “Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion.”
Say what?
With the article in the MIT Technology Review was a photo of President Donald Trump standing with Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett. This led to copycat articles in several other publications, some of which later had to run corrections on their misleading headlines.
The MIT piece began with a religion angle:
This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.
The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.
The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a “major pro-life victory” and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the “outrageous and disgusting” practice of “experimentation using baby body parts.”
That was about as far as most people read the piece. Now what are the chance that Trump knew or cared anything about the actual cell lines that were used in this case? Surely he had a lot of other stuff on his mind while at Walter Reed.
Two of my predictably liberal friends had posted links to the piece along with comments about Trump’s hypocrisy.
“I guess he’s only anti-abortion unless it benefits him.”
“Unbelievable hypocrisy!”
“His doctors at Walter Reed Hospital are under the commander-in-chief.”
I protested to both these friends, saying the article was a cheap shot because it made out like Trump sat up in his hospital bed and approved the fact that his meds had come from an abortion. The folks I addressed didn’t care.
I get that Facebook is largely the domain of idiots. Read and verify?
Noting that the MIT piece was dated Oct. 7, I wondered how they knew about the president’s drug cocktail. Sure enough, Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman out of California who runs a non-stop feed trashing Trump, posted this two days earlier.
The MIT reporter probably saw the tweet and ran with it. Read a bit further and you can see the writer walk back the big idea of the headline.
But when the president faced a deadly encounter with covid-19, his administration raised no objections over the fact that the new drugs also relied on fetal cells, and anti-abortion campaigners were silent too. Most likely, their hypocrisy was unwitting. Many types of medical and vaccine research employ supplies of cells originally acquired from abortion tissue. It would have taken an expert to realize that was the case with Trump’s treatment.
No kidding. Now read the next two paragraphs closely.
Last Friday, as Trump developed worrisome symptoms of covid-19, the president received an emergency cocktail of anti-coronavirus antibodies made by Regeneron. These molecules are manufactured in cells from a hamster’s ovary, so-called “CHO” cells, according to the company — not in human cells.
But cells originally derived from a fetus were used in another way. According to Regeneron, laboratory tests used to assess the potency of its antibodies employed a standardized supply of cells called HEK 293T, whose origin was kidney tissue from an abortion in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
A Catholic News Service piece about that same line identifies the abortion has having happened in 1972. So Trump didn’t actually get cells from a 48-year-old abortion pumped into him. The cells came from a test to assess the quality of his meds that had come from an abortion a very long time ago, scientifically speaking. Big difference there.
But the MIT piece considers the drug and the test upon the drug as basically the same thing. Still, how would anyone in any hospital anywhere be aware that a test involving one of your meds had dubious ethical origins from another country, decades ago?
Because the 293T cells were acquired so long ago, and have lived so long in the laboratory, they are no longer thought of as involving abortion politics.
“It’s how you want to parse it,” says Alexandra Bowie, a Regeneron spokesperson. “But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue.”
At the bottom of the story was this note:
An earlier version of this story was headlined "Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells from an abortion." The words "originally derived" were added to clarify that the cells are not from a recent abortion.
The story would have not gotten the same reaction had the headline said the abortion was close to 50 years ago. The original made it sound like tissue from the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic got rushed over to Walter Reed.
But who cares about such journalistic subtleties when the political damage has already been done? The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice.com, Haaretz and Business Insider are only some of the publications that ran with the story.
The Guardian piece even managed to drag Barrett into the story, but got some facts wrong. It too ran a lengthy correction:
This article was amended on 9 October 2020 to clarify that HEK-293T cells are derived from an embryonic kidney, but are not in fact stem cells, and the headline was amended to clarify the cells were derived from an abortion, rather than specifically from an “aborted fetus”.
Should have gotten those headlines right the first time, folks. And to what audience was that article aimed? Perhaps at Catholics in vital Rust Belt states who care about such things as research using human fetal tissue and whose votes, as Clemente Lisi wrote on Saturday, are vital on Nov. 3?
A follow-up Business Insider piece on Friday, which got all the details right, didn’t blame Trump. Instead, it noted what hypocrites pro-life groups are for not condemning Trump’s meds.
This kind of journalism — Inaccurate headlines and what seems like an agenda to blame Trump for even matters he has no control over — is what has driven many conservatives away from the mainstream media in droves. Look at the subhead about the MIT piece:
The Trump administration has looked to curtail research with fetal cells. But when it was life or death for the president, no one objected.
But then when you read the small print, you realize that probably a lot of meds -– including vaccines we all use –- may have come from fetal cells from the older cell lines and that everyone is complicit.
The Vatican has struggled with this quandary for years and its 2008 bioethics document “Dignitas Personae,” speaks to it. And in 2005, the Vatican said was that morally compromised meds — as in a rubella vaccine derived from two aborted fetuses in 1964 and 1970 — are temporarily allowable until a better alternative can be found.
The issue is more current than ever with efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The Vatican has been pushing for a vaccine with abortion-free cell lines, as there are many who would refuse to be inoculated with something derived from aborted babies.
(Can you imagine such a vaccine coming out and the Catholic Church instructing its 1 billion members not to take it? Now that would be quite the bio-ethics journalism bonanza.)
There’s so many places that this MIT Technology piece could have gone that would have been journalistically honest and would have brought up the ethical thicket we face with vaccines and meds. But no, they chose to take the low road and trash Trump for something he could not have known about. Cheap shots often lead to corrections that sting.
There’s plenty of legit reasons to criticize the president and many of his supporters, but intention use of abortion cell lines isn’t one of them.