For up-to-date information on how to request a religious exemption for Covid vaccines, please visit this article.
The Covid vaccines are failing. They are not providing the protection that was promised. It was actually clear that this would be the case from the beginning of the clinical trials. The vaccines simply do not provide much real world protection. As a noted medical researcher wrote on this site months ago:
Justification for any treatment is found only when the benefits outweigh the risks. A quick look at the side effect rates in the tables of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s product monographs shows that although not life threatening in the studies, mild, moderate and severe side effects occurred with greater frequency than the <1% protection afforded by the Covid-19 Pfizer vaccine or the 1.2% protection afforded by the Moderna vaccine.
The Covid vaccines are only of potentially slight benefit for perhaps the highest-risk demographics. For all others, they are an unnecessary risk against a disease that is relatively mild in those without substantial co-morbidities. The vaccines are about profit, and possibly social control, but they are definitely not about public health. The first vaccinations were given less than a year ago, and we are already back in masks while the medical establishment starts to push booster shots.
The failure of the vaccines is becoming daily more obvious. Tucker Carlson said the following on his show when discussing the situation:
And now, surprise, surprise. They are demanding that even after you got the shot, you wear a mask again even when you’re outside. What’s going on here? Why are they saying this? There’s got to be some reason for it. We’ve been wondering all week. So yesterday, we asked the CDC to explain the reasoning behind it. They couldn’t tell us.
Today, they did. What an explanation.
It turns out that the COVID vaccines, those wonder drugs that were absolutely perfect, that were more impressive than the moon landing, the drugs you were not allowed to question in any way don’t actually work in the way they told us they did. The science is more complicated than we thought.
There’s still an awful lot we don’t know, these are after all experimental drugs, and they are behaving like it. The bottom line is that a huge number of vaccinated people are getting COVID, and some of them are getting very sick even dying. That’s true around the world. It’s true in Iceland, Gibraltar, Israel, in small countries with high vaccination rates that have seen big spikes in COVID cases, and it’s every bit is true here in the United States.
According to the CDC today, fully three-quarters of the people infected in a recent outbreak, for example in Massachusetts had already been vaccinated. The CDC announced that vaccinated people can carry the virus with them, and they can easily spread the virus to others. As the CDC conceded, quote, “Breakthrough infections may be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases.”
In addition to being experimental, dangerous, and seemingly useless, the vaccines are also, from a Christian perspective, morally unacceptable. An Orthodox medical doctor has reported evidence that the Moderna, Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have used aborted fetal cell lines in their development. She did not find the same type of evidence for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, but could not be sure that fetal cell line usage did not predate the development of the Pfizer vaccine in an in-direct manner. Pfizer has been confirmed to have used fetal cells in testing.
Known Role of Aborted Fetal Cell Lines in Some Covid-19 Vaccines
It is morally unacceptable for Christians to be associated in any way with abortion. We have an iron clad religious exemption as the documents below conclusively prove. These documents were put together by a young Orthodox man who is active on Twitter under the handle @PatriarchPrimus. If you use Twitter, he is worth a follow. We posted an excellent article he did last year on Orthodoxy for African-Americans.
While the documents are originally geared towards the military (which is mandating vaccination), it is adaptable for any employment. The information is invaluable. Please download, read and share.
Especially in health care, the Medical-Pharma complex is pushing mandatory vaccines. Nurses are being threatened with loss of employment, at a time when we are supposedly trying to protect the ability of our hospitals to function. Hospitals in many areas are already critically understaffed, and this will only make things worse. We expect that as their desperation climbs, the pro-vaccine side will resort to increasingly authoritarian tactics. There is no logical, rational case to be made for vaccinating the young, the healthy, those with natural immunity, and those with certain medical conditions. When reason fails, only force is left.
We don’t expect this to last, however. The vaccine narrative is collapsing in real time, thanks be to God. For even many vaccinated, the demands they get boosters, and still keep wearing masks, will be too much to ask. The sheer insanity of the situation will produce more opposition. Voluntary, informed consent to medical treatment, such as vaccines, is an absolute moral right. We are anxiously awaiting state-level legislation and/or executive orders to protect that right against interference by private corporations and local governments. Let us all pray for this.
You might ask yourself – why did a layman have to prepare these documents, and not a theologian or possibly a bishop? Quite simply, many of our bishops have excused the connection to abortion. Some have said they believe the “life-saving” potential of the vaccines outweighs any ethical consideration. A few have made the argument that the abortions happened so long ago they no longer “count.” Others have made incorrect statements about the role of fetal cell lines in vaccine development and production. Most Orthodox theologians are pro-vaccine. We have responded to them in such articles as here, here, and here. Worse, more than few clergy have promoted the vaccines as if they were the black-robed marketing arm of Big Pharma. They have even applied “moral blackmail” to their flocks, claiming that getting a vaccine is a moral duty to “protect others.”
Do not succumb to such moral blackmail. Getting a vaccine will not protect you or anyone else. The clergy pushing these vaccines should repent immediately. As the documents below make clear, regardless of the incorrect views of any current hierarchs – the Orthodox Faith stands squarely against these vaccines. Our moral duty as Orthodox Christians is to refuse them.
Related Articles:
Word Documents and PDF versions of the religious exemption documents below:
1. Compilation of Synodal Statements, Medical Studies, Professional Dissertations, and Hierarchical and Monastic Statements which either forbid totally or recommend against receiving the COVID-19 Vaccine. Confirmation that it is not only your right to not be subject to the COVID Vaccine, but also a duty as an Orthodox Christian. It is contradictory to the Orthodox Faith no matter how you look at it. It cannot be justified and may even lead to our eternal spiritual disaster.
2. List of reasons why it would not impede mission readiness, nor disrupt physical capacity to perform, if you do not receive a COVID Vaccine.
3. Complete request for military exemption, including cover letter and the above two documents. This request is based on the doctrinal mandate to abstain from any medicines which are the product of immoral production, and the religious advisory of the synods, hierarchs, elders, medical workers of the Eastern Orthodox Church against the COVID-19 vaccine.
Along with my wife, son, and two daughters we are Greek Orthodox and agree it us against our religious beliefs to be vaccinated with these current experimental vaccines for all the reasons you state.But I do not understand how we can apply for this exemption in a way and paper that has our names and also the acknowledgement/signature of a church authority to validate them as official
Please see this article for an answer to that question. You do not have to have a clergy note.
https://orthodoxreflections.com/for-covid-vaccine-religious-exemptions-your-sincerely-held-beliefs-are-what-matter/
Document number 1 has a lot of good infromation, but would be a lot more compelling to an employer if it didn’t mention “micro-chipping risk” from these vaccines. This is where the employer cries “conspiracy nut”.
It does need to be tailored to the audience. We always recommend stating your objections in your own words.
No “micro-chipping risk”, but maybe something way beyond that:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/30/watch-the-future-of-vaccines/
We also need to be consider that these Gene based vaccines interfere with basic life structure – our cell and cell nucleus. They alter our cells and make them produce substance that is not intended by Our Creator. This is foreign to us substance. God didn’t give us permission to change ourselves on genetic level.
Sadly I must be at odds with most of the Orthodox theologians whose position I strongly oppose. I’m thankful for the wisdom and foresight given to many monks and hierarchs as to where this event has come from and where it is leading us.
I don’t believe this event is going to be permitted to end. They will either manufacture or produce a continuing threat and very possibly, already have done so. The seeds are planted in the injections. The ‘spiked protein’ is synthetic, man made. It was created as a weapon. It was known years ago that it was dangerous. And now they are trying to inject the entire world population with it and have done so to millions. I’m suspicious that they will spread this toxin to others by close contact even while it is weakening their own body. We will know soon enough.
Seventy-six (76) innocent babies were removed from their mother’s wombs via C-section, had their tissues extracted without anesthesia, and then were murdered, all so that Dr Stanley Plotkin could conduct gruesome experiments to yield the two fetal cell lines which are used in the development, testing, and, in some cases, production of the dangerous, inefficacious, and unnecessary experimental mRNA therapies (“Covid Vaccines”).
“It is commonly cited that just two aborted fetuses have been used in fetal cell line development, but in his testimony during a January 2018 deposition during a custody dispute, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a world renowned vaccine scientist was introduced as an expert witness by the plaintiff and admitted that he used the tissues of 76 fetuses in just one study he conducted at the Wistar Institute. The use of aborted babies in vaccine development is clearly more frequent than we are being told.”
https://www.cga.ct.gov/kid/related/20190513_Informational%20Hearing%20on%20the%20State's%20Religious%20Exemption/Testimony/Testimony%20Lorie%20C.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiNzMmNUVHukXBG7ZdFzt7A
“Unfortunately, as John-Henry Westen so recently documented, it is not uncommon for vaccine researchers to dissimulate in a similar way on the use of aborted fetal tissue in their research. Dr. Stanley Plotkin, who gave a nine-hour deposition on his work with aborted fetal tissue in vaccines, has publicly claimed that only two abortions were involved in the creation of the cell lines that are used in vaccines. While not technically an overt lie, the assertion ignores the other 74 aborted fetuses who were used in the experiments conducted by Dr. Plotkin himself as he worked on developing aborted fetal cell–derived vaccines. In essence, he is counting only the abortions that went into the “finished product” and not those that were involved in the research and development that made the cell lines possible. This misleads those who are trying to make evaluations of the gravity of using these cell lines.”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/vaccine-expert-answers-critics-exposes-horrific-nature-of-abortion-tainted-vaccine-research/
“The use of ‘confirmatory testing’ in Pfizer and Moderna vaccines”
“There is an additional issue at hand in the discussion about the current coronavirus vaccines. Much has been made of the phrase “confirmatory testing” in order to dismiss ethical concerns about the use of aborted fetal cells in the development of the synthetic mRNA coronavirus vaccines. However, it was not a single after-market confirmation that employed these cells, as is suggested by the phrase and the way it is generally touted; on the contrary, aborted fetal cells were used in multiple phases of design and development for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The scientific literature sets the record straight:
A foundational test that was an integral part of the design phase was done in aborted fetal cells for both the Pfizer [12] and the Moderna [13] vaccines. The original spike protein was unstable when it was not attached to the whole virus, so vaccine developers introduced a few mutations into the sequence (along with some additional mutations to stabilize the mRNA and prevent it being degraded too quickly in the body after vaccination). The developers needed to check to see that the new, synthetic mRNA sequence generated the proper three-dimensional structure that they expected to produce. In order to do this, they genetically modified human cells to produce the mutated spike protein and then purified it from the cells. The protein production was done in HEK-293 cells (Pfizer specifically used Expi293F cells, which are a derivative line from the original HEK-293).
HEK-293 cells were used to test expression of the mRNA. To do this, researchers put the mRNA developed for the vaccine into the growth medium with human cells, along with some chemicals that increase the cells’ ability to take up the genetic information. Then they measured the amount of spike protein that the cells made. This was done in aborted fetal cells for both Pfizer [12] and Moderna [14] vaccines.
HEK-293 cells were used to test delivery of the vaccine via the novel lipid nanoparticle technology. The researchers needed to see if they could get the mRNA into the cells inside the nanoparticles, because this would be the only way to manage delivery in a living person. The process is very similar to the test just described, except that the mRNA is now encased inside the lipid nanoparticle and no special chemicals are used. This was done in aborted fetal cells for the Moderna [15] vaccine.
ACE-2-overexpressing HEK-293T cells were used to create pseudoviruses for a neutralization assay to detect the presence of antibodies. This means that the vaccine developers needed some non-infectious viruses to determine if vaccinated individuals made binding antibodies to the virus. These pseudoviruses (which expressed the spike proteins but would not actually infect humans) were grown in aborted fetal cells and harvested from these cell cultures. Both Pfizer [12] and Moderna [16] used HEK-293 for these tests.
All of this demonstrates that there is a much greater involvement with aborted fetal cell lines than recent statements on the morality of the vaccines suggest — this by itself would warrant the possibility of respectfully asking for a re-evaluation of these arguments, as their starting points are inadequate. This is very relevant to the argument of remote cooperation with evil, which will be dealt with in a subsequent section of this article.”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/scientific-truths-logical-fallacies-and-acquiescence-to-evil-a-reply-to-emmanuele-barbieri/
This was an excellent summary, thank you for being clear and simple. I wish more of our clergy were as vocal and clear.
Don’t forget to add the synodal statement of the OCA signed in the early 2000s against pharmaceutical testing on aborted fetal cells “for any purpose.”
“ We cannot, however, condone the manipulation of embryonic cells in any form for research purposes, including lines developed from destroyed embryos. Rather, we can only express dismay at the fact that the debate over this issue has avoided major considerations regarding the very meaning and value of human life.
President Bush’s proposal to use only the existing sixty lines of stem cells ( 2 ) because the embryos had already been destroyed (i.e., killed) falters on the precept enunciated by the apostle Paul in Romans 3:8, “We may not do evil so that good may come.” The very act of destroying those embryos is evil, and we may not profit from evil even to achieve a good and noble end.”
https://www.oca.org/holy-synod/statements/holy-synod/embryonic-stem-cell-research-in-the-perspective-of-orthodox-christianity
Thank you for the excellent article. God bless you and keep you well.