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Phydios wrote:

I understand and respect that, but as I said, I feel no conviction to agree. The Nazis did horrific experiments on unwilling victims- if you could save lives with information derived from those torture sessions decades ago, would you?

This isn't even theoretical, of course.

For example we know that paracetamol and penicillin are very safe in pregnancy. We know this because the nazis were evil enough to do tests.

Most medicines we have now we don't know for sure that they're safe in pregnancy as we can no longer ethically do those trials.

Knowing that we only know paracetamol and penicillin to be pregnancy safe because of unethical moral experiments, is it okay to use that knowledge as doctors? Or should that knowledge be suppressed because it was derived unethically?

Indeed, should we refuse to act on that knowledge if we already know it?

To swing this back to the vaccine, is it immoral to use a vaccine which uses a process that involves HEK293 cells? These cells are descendants of kidney cells from an aborted foetus but they are not the actual cells.

As a thought experiment replace abortion with adult murder victim. If in the 1970s we had harvested the cells of a murder victim (who was killed, but not killed FOR those cells) would it be immoral to use those cell's descendants?