Clarence Thomas Spreads Anti-Vax Disinfo in a Supreme Court Dissent


Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used vaccine disinformation to justify his opinion in a case before the Supreme Court. It appeared in a dissent in the ruling on DR. A., ET AL. v. KATHY HOCHUL, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK, ET AL., where the majority opinion upheld New York's vaccine mandeate for health care workers.

In his dissent Thomas said, in part, 

Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.  

 Thomas cited this as a sound reason for objecting to vaccinations on religious grounds.

The only problem? It's not true, or more accurately, it's only 1/3 true. Of the three major vaccines, only Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vaccine requires fetal cells for production. Moderna and Pfizer only used the cell lines in testing. 

But still the cells were used for Moderna and Pfizer for testing, right? Well yes, but that's also true of other vaccines Thomas himself may have taken, including varicella (chicken pox), rubella (part of MMR vaccines which everyone Thomas's age received as kids), hepatitis A, and rabies.

Even if Thomas hasn't had any of those vaccines, chances are 100% that he has taken at least one of these other pharmaceuticals that have used fetal cell lines in one way or another, including acetaminophen (Tylenol), albuterol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Pepto Bismol, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, Preparation H, Claritin, Prilosec, and Zoloft. 

The California Catholic Conference and the Vatican have both said it is acceptable to use vaccines that use the fetal cell lines. Not that they are the arbiters of what is moral or not, but they are as reliably anti-abortion as you can get. If they are saying it's OK then those who take Thomas's position can truly be considered extremists.

This is, for me, another piece of evidence that Thomas is not issuing opinions based on facts, but rather based on a political agenda that is supposed to have no place in the workings of the Supreme Court. Or at least that is the way things were not so long ago. 


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