Fr. John Parker: Welcome to The Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s. This is Fr. John Parker; I’m the Dean of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and we greet you on what up here is kind of a gloomy day in the aftermath of a hurricane that didn’t quite come this far, but we had rain and tornado warnings yesterday.

Here in the seminary, as is the case in each of our seminaries, we are having to face the question of COVID and the COVID vaccines, and in wrestling through those particular challenges and topics, I thought it would be helpful to share some time with you, to share with you, dear listeners, a dear friend of mine, Dr. Ryan Sampson Nash, a medical doctor and faithful Orthodox Christian and bioethicist, who works specifically with COVID and with vaccines and ventilators and the like. So we’re going to spend some time together, about an hour and a quarter, talking through some of the various aspects related to the vaccines specifically, and I’d like to lay out sort of the roadmap of today as I begin to introduce Dr. Nash.

First of all, I would like to say that we will take some calls—we are willing to take calls; let’s put it that way. Maybe you’re not willing to call in, but if you are, we’ll start taking calls probably in 45 minutes, about quarter after the next hour; that’s 2:15 on the East Coast. That number to call in, at that time, is 855-237-2346; that’s 855-237-2346. We’ll start taking those calls in about 45 minutes. Probably you don’t want to call in yet and just wait on hold.

We’ve divided our time as we have been planning this day into four or five different parts. One we’ll call authority; one we’ll call bioethics; one we’ll call the HEK cell line—that’s the human embryonic kidney cell line, otherwise known as “murdered baby parts, murdered babies” as it’s often spoken about in arguments about the COVID vaccine—the fourth section we might call the mRNA vaccines; we’ll talk about some of the questions of the harms of the vaccines and mandates which may arise now as news this morning notes that the FDA has approved at least one of the vaccines. That’s our general approach to things for the next hour and a quarter.

I would like to say that, in all of this, we take that beautiful phrase, that beautiful request of ourselves that we pray in so many litanies in our Orthodox church services: “Let us commend ourselves and each other and all our lives unto Christ our God.” That’s going to be a foundation for what we’re talking about: commending ourselves and each other and all our life unto Christ our God. And just to, I don’t know, poke the bear, so to speak, I like to leave a little sentence for talking about later on: Did you know? Fun fact! In 1835, St. Innocent, formerly the priest Fr. John Veniaminov, who became St. Innocent of Alaska, urged the vaccination of a smallpox outbreak among the Native Alaskans, which actually caused their conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Fun fact to discuss perhaps later on.

So let’s start with the question of authority. St. Paul, at the beginning of most of his epistles, lists his apostolic credentials in order that you and I will listen to him on the grounds of his apostolic authority. The question of authority can be asked in another form: Whom do you trust? While it is the case that nothing is specifically a spiritual problem only or a medical problem only, we should entrust ourselves to medical doctors and especially Orthodox Christian ones who understand our basic background on life and how to live it.

So whom do you trust with the question of COVID and the vaccines? Today I hope you will learn to trust my friend, Dr. Ryan Sampson Nash. Dr. Nash, sorry for the long preface, but welcome to The Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s.

Dr. Ryan Sampson Nash: Father, bless. Thank you for having me.

Fr. John: The Lord bless you and all of us indeed. Dr. Nash, as we begin, and because time is precious to us today, please share with us a little bit about your medical background and your relationship to the question of COVID and the vaccines as we get started.

Dr. Nash: Yes, thank you, Father. Well, I’ll start by saying I’m a sinner. I’m not going to claim to have a special perception, direct perception or holy perception into the things of truth in a way that someone with a pure heart may have. And I also don’t bear the burden or the dignity of being bishop or any rank of the clergy. So I am a physician, and I’m a physician who has done ethics work for the last 20 years and seen patients. I’ve seen over 10,000 patients. I continue to have a clinical practice at the James Cancer Center. At The Ohio State University, I am the Hagop S. Mekhjian Endowed Chair for medical ethics and professionalism. I’m the Director for the Center for Bioethics at The Ohio State University. I’m one of the directors for an international conference on religion and medicine. My roles clinically include caring for patients with advanced cancer. I also help write policy and do clinical ethics consultation for our health system.

Related to COVID, I’ve been an advisor for regional, state, and national agencies; I’ve been an advisor for ecclesial entities as well—not that any of the aforementioned have followed my advice, but I have been an advisor. I have also been the chair for scarce resource allocation for our medical center and an advisor on the state level. What this means—you mentioned ventilators—were there to be a case where we have a shortage of ventilators or any medical resource, and if I have five patients that need a ventilator and I have one ventilator, it’s me, along with a small team of informed experts that help each other, that has to make that decision. And so, doing so, I’ve been aware… I have access to data, especially on the state of Ohio level where I mainly focus my attention, throughout most of the hospitals in Ohio, throughout the system, I’ve met with. I’ve been on task forces for COVID and COVID-response, again at the local and state and national level, where I’m meeting daily or weekly, depending on the level of the pandemic, with leading experts from around the country.

I think that gives a glimpse. From an Orthodox standpoint, I try to be a traditionalist. I was a dear friend and student of Tristram—Reader Herman—Tristram Engelhardt. I travelled with him for the final years of his life, and so for not quite a decade I was under his tutelage as I was trying to learn Orthodox Christian bioethics. I’ve taught Christian bioethics in many different venues, including graduate schools and guest lecturing and doing courses at seminaries as well.

Fr. John: Including at the invitation of His Eminence, Archbishop Michael, here in his ethics class. Thank you.

Dr. Nash: Indeed.

Fr. John: So let’s take a turn to our first major topic, and that is the question of bioethics. One observation that I make as I see various debates and so forth that ensue online and perhaps in the lives of seminarians is the question of bioethics. This is a good problem to have in a certain sense, because this—the question of the… the bioethical questions related to the COVID vaccine are perhaps some first time in the arena in bioethical categories for a number of Orthodox Christians. So I want to say it’s a good problem because people are starting to think in bioethical terms, and yet there is a challenge involved in all of that, and that, as you and I have discussed on other occasions, Dr. Nash, includes the fact that in real-life bioethical situation, there often are very few black-and-white situations; one has to deal in an area of gray often. So maybe give us a little overview of Orthodox Christian bioethics, and let’s talk specifically about bioethical concerns related to the COVID vaccine as we walk through that.

Dr. Nash: Let me think. It’s a good question. I’ll say that bioethics is a field that really filled a void in the early 20th century after Vatican II and after Protestants had fallen into liberal theology and ethics, and bioethics was more of a humanism approach to try and define moral consensus—a moral consensus that doesn’t exist. In one sense, I’m not “for” bioethics. If I’m at a conference and someone says—a Christian conference, and someone says, “We need more bioethics,” I’d say, “No, you need the Church; you need Christ.” Bioethics as a field of study, though, and inquiry, is helpful in that there is a lot of content, or facts and understandings of medicine and healthcare and policy, so there are many facts that the field of bioethics does engage.

So bioethics as a content, as kind of a position—well, there’s multiple positions—but bioethics is a field of inquiry where we’re engaging one of the real dilemmas of the modern era, that is, how to utilize medical technology in this rapidly expanding age of technology advancement. Bioethics has grappled with that. Bioethics is also a field that gives an interesting lens into our culture wars. The way we view the good and the right, issues of God or dealing with what is now increasingly a godless culture, bioethics gets at the heart of this very quickly.

Now, the COVID crisis has, especially as people have had more time in front of their computers, people are trying to work through dilemmas most of which are not new in the field of bioethics. So you have a lot of well-intentioned priests and a lot of well-intentioned Orthodox Christians—I assume the well intentions…

Fr. John: That’s a good assumption to try to keep.

Dr. Nash: Right. I try to keep a judgment of charity, even though I’m sent on a daily basis emails and videos of people that aren’t approaching things in a sober way or an informed way. They’re approaching it with zeal, but not a zeal according to knowledge, let alone epignosis, the higher knowledge. So you have people that are neophytes, who are smart, but they’re trying to become experts in epidemiology and experts in ethics and experts in medicine from their computer screen, over a year’s period. I’ve done… I’ve taught medical ethics for 20 years, and I can say that most of these attempts fail; they fall short by a great degree.

One of the temptations in doing ethics work, especially in the West, is that we try to have a clarity—you mentioned this in your question, these areas of gray—Western ethics often tries to devalue ethics into a philosophical puzzle, where what is moral is based on the intent or the outcome or the direct means of doing something, and that this can be rationally considered, and you can have a very clear good versus evil. Now, within our holy Tradition, we clearly do have things that are good—love of Christ, love of neighbor—we do clearly have things that are evil, and I’m not challenging this. In no way should anyone hear moral relativism or a denial or antinomianism or a denial of those truths.

But many times the Western philosophical project leads you into a nice theory, but a theory that doesn’t really hit at the reality of the existence that we live in. So, for instance, those who want purity of all good or all evil, I think wouldn’t be able to practice medicine. Where every medication, anything that works has a risk—I think we’ll cover that later. So any medicine that a physician potentially gives also has the potential of bringing harm.

Fr. John: Sure, it’s a list of side effects on every and all medicines.

Dr. Nash: Right, so that in itself—I know I have prescribed medicines that have harmed patients. I bear that. I will answer for that. I do in this life, and I may in the life to come. It’s a burden that all physicians bear. We all do in some ways. But there’s also: many of the ethics dilemmas that we encounter are not as easy as “this is the right way; this is the wrong way.” I routinely am making healthy guide decisions on whether to continue advanced medical technologies like a ventilator or hemodialysis on a patient with dismal prognosis, a patient that our best clinical judgment is that they’re not going to survive the hospital stay, regardless of what we do. And the question is: Do we continue a ventilator, knowing that they’ll likely die in a number of days-to-weeks, or do we remove the ventilator and allow them to die as well? Neither of those feels good and right, because it doesn’t restore healing; it doesn’t restore wholeness. Neither feels right, but you can’t not decide. Actually not-deciding is a decision in itself.

So when especially an Orthodox Christian engages with medicine, there is this reality that many of the ethical dilemmas that we engage are in this difficult discernment of what’s the best. Sometimes it’s seemingly choosing between two imperfect options. Not always is it seemingly choosing the lesser of two evils. I don’t want to… I think that goes too far. I think that category does exist in ethics, but in medicine usually they’re imperfect, tainted options. And we’re seeing this in COVID. The treatments, including the preventative treatments of the vaccines, are not perfect. They have ethical taint on them, sullied in some ways, like all medications are, and they have the risk of potential harms, but they’re overwhelmingly positive for patients that they do help prevent moderate, severe disease and death, so those have to be balanced against each other.

So in bioethics generally or in medical ethics generally, there are clear, specially from an Orthodox view—there are clear right and wrong—there are some things that we cannot do and should not do—but there are also these more gray areas where we’re not choosing among clear, bright, and rational responses. Again, the web essays may make nice arguments in theory, but they don’t apply to reality, and they’re often written by those who aren’t engaged in the reality of making these decisions. As I don’t bear the burden of clergy or bishop of any rank, many who are opining do not bear the burden of medical decision-making, although I do recognize there are many physicians who are saying many questionable things as well.

Fr. John: Right. You all are listening to The Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s. This is Fr. John Parker, and I’m having a conversation with my friend, Dr. Ryan Sampson Nash, a medical doctor. We are talking about the question of COVID and especially the question of COVID vaccinations. Right now it’s about ten minutes until two on the East Coast, and in approximately 25 minutes we are willing to take your calls. If you’d like to call in, I would wait another 20, 25 minutes, but you could call 1-855-237-2346; that’s 1-855-AF-RADIO.

Dr. Nash, let’s talk about the serious bioethical question that is raised by most people, and that is the question of the HEK cell line, the human embryonic kidney cell line, which comes, I believe—you’ll give us the details—comes from a 1970-era, probably elective, abortion, and how the cell lines that come from that particular child are employed in the production of vaccines—and other medicines, I should have added at the beginning. Please help us navigate through this challenging question.

Dr. Nash: Yeah, so to state it a different way—we’ll get to the specifics—I have been doing pro-life work for my entire career. I just want to… Again, people that are new to the field, new to engaging these, don’t know that there’s different camps within the pro-life movement. I belong to one camp that I think actively tries to inform policy and help further the pro-life cause, but I think there is also what I consider a more radical and sensational pro-life sector that, in my judgment, does not deal well with facts, doesn’t… They use sensational language to bring attention to themselves, and I don’t know if they’re profiting from it; I don’t know their motive, but they often thwart the policy work that the more sober pro-life groups further. So for the last 25 years I’ve done work with the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, Americans United for Life, and groups like the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

And the Charlotte Lozier Institute is one of the institutes that helped expose HEK cells long before COVID, but they’ve also been… I mean, their website had more hits in I think a week on the HEK cell news than it had had for probably years combined. David Prentiss, the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, and I have talked about this many times, then. The intent of the Charlotte Lozier Institute was [and] is to try to increase public awareness of the HEK cell line and to encourage science to find better alternatives and for them not to use it. So, to make things clear, I prefer—I don’t think the HEK cell line should be used; I think there can be alternatives.

Now, what is the HEK cell line? It is not baby parts put in a serum that’s going to be injected into someone. In, around 1970, there was a probably elective abortion—we don’t know all the details—that a tissue sample was taken from this baby that was aborted. That tissue sample was put in culture and the culture grew. The culture has been genetically modified in various ways for different laboratory studies, so we’re not talking about a baby part; we’re talking about tissue culture. That may give us some pause in an Orthodox Christian sense about whether there should be human tissue cultures at all, but they are ubiquitous in science, and actually pre-dated 1970. There have been tissue cultures used for a long time in medicine.

The HEK cell line came to attention because they are used in, around the COVID vaccines, most of them at least. Many of them used HEK cell lines in research and development of the vaccines, and some of the vaccines used the HEK cell line to grow the vaccine on that surface, on that tissue, as well. When the HEK cell line is used as a surface for the growth of the vaccine, there is a chance of micro-contamination from fragments. This is not the same as having aborted baby cells injected into someone. These would be microfragments of DNA that’s possible, but again there is an extraction process to try to eliminate that. It’s very possible that there would be no contamination. Then there’s also post-production research, that after production the cells were—the tissue culture was used.

So how was this used in science? If you’re going to get a drug approved, you need to know something like: How does this effect potassium channels? And there’s an HEK cell line tissue that’s programmed and set to test potassium channels and how the drug will interact with human potassium channels. To do really rapid and excellent science, often these tissue cultures give us a lot of information on how a drug or how something will react to human cells. For the COVID vaccines, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did not use HEK cells in the research and development, and they did not use HEK cells in the production. There are post-production research on it with the HEK cells. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine did use HEK cell line for production and research and development. So did Sputnik in Russia and AstraZeneca vaccine. There are a couple of vaccines that claim that they did not use HEK cell lines. If you look into those, they probably did purchase medical information or information from companies that did use HEK cell lines. That’s one of the difficulties. A lot of these studies don’t have to be published or reported.

So, is this important? I think it is important. I’d rather not use HEK cell lines. I think there should be viable alternatives. I don’t want to profit from anything that was related to an abortion. However, we also have to realize that this has been not quite ubiquitous but incredibly common for any pharmaceutical, any naturopathic remedies—so, vitamins and things such as that—any diagnostic or therapeutic device often is tested against tissue cultures and often the second most common human tissue culture available in labs is the HEK cell line.

Fr. John: Dr. Nash, sorry for interrupting, this is a striking point that I think everyone needs to hear. You have been extremely clear that you as a medical doctor and a bioethicist would prefer that we not use HEK cell lines, that is, the cell lines that have been derived from a 1970s era abortion, and yet those cell lines, you say, while not ubiquitous, meaning everywhere present, are quite all over the place present in all kinds of various medicines and vitamins. You’ve mentioned to me vitamin D supplements on the one hand, and you mentioned to me in an earlier conversation I believe metformin, one of the most common blood pressure medications. Could you…?

Dr. Nash: Blood sugar, for diabetes.

Fr. John: Excuse me, diabetes.

Dr. Nash: All of your common diabetes and blood pressure medications are going to be tested on HEK cells. Most—many of your herbal remedies and vitamin supplements are going to be tested on HEK cells. I mean, it’s just common, very, very common. Cancer drugs sometimes are not; sometimes they are, but there are other cell lines that are more common in cancer research. And again, a lot of these things are unpublished studies. They’re part of the development process to see what the reaction is. Most scientists—you opened by saying that the bioethical issue that’s on most people’s minds—well, that’s kind of only pro-life Christians! [Laughter] Most scientists and most of bioethics aren’t paying attention to this question at all. I gave a talk at Ohio State on it, and most were completely unaware. Most of the scientists that are grabbing HEK tissue culture are unaware of where it came from, and even if they were aware of it, they may not care. And there have been—in all fairness, there have been Orthodox academics who’ve defended the use of HEK cell lines, that it’s not bringing more abortions; it’s not causing more abortions, and it’s a cell line that has been propagated, and we could benefit from it. I’m a little bit more hesitant than that. I think there are viable alternatives that should be used instead.

But it is… If you’re going to reject the vaccine solely based on HEK cell use, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to then reject almost all of modern medicine, all of supplement-world, and there are other industries that will be problematic as well. And by the same logic, I think you can participate in evil in a multitude of ways. The very computer that some of the opiners are using to do their podcasts or write their essay probably directly contribute to future abortions more by funding companies that further political agendas that are antithetical to Orthodoxy. So if, by extension—I agree that as Orthodox Christians we must distance ourselves from sin, but because we live in a fallen world, in a world that is corrupted by sin, our ability to have a pure, untainted reality is illusive.

Fr. John: Well, it goes right down to the point, in all probability, without too much exaggeration, I imagine, we could buy almost nothing from anyone, from food to shoes, electricity, whatever, because of the amount of taint, for lack of a better word, that’s generically sin—it’s in everything—but specifically the sin of abortion touches so many companies and the products that they sell.

Dr. Nash: I think I’ve said this to you before: three years ago, I was thrown from my horse and I broke my neck. If I was going to insist on an absolutely ethically, morally pure medicine to treat me, I should have lain there and died. Instead, I chose to have surgery, knowing all of the ethical problems within healthcare; knowing them, I chose to… And I think that that’s permitted. There’s not a moral obligation not to partake of medicine, even though it’s tainted.

Fr. John: Well, on the flip-side of the coin, which I don’t want to lose, which is the question of the aborted… the cells derived from an aborted fetus; the flip-side of that could be argued—please correct me if I’m wrong—on the question of whether or not a person could benefit from an organ that was harvested from a murder victim. So, for example, one could do a little research on this and find some examples of it, a person who was murdered in his backyard but was an organ donor and offered his liver to another person. In that case, it’s also murder—in this case, murder of an adult—but a person is directly benefitting from that murder.

Dr. Nash: Yeah, this was actually one of my mentor, Tristram Engelhardt—Reader Herman Engelhardt’s arguments. Now, we have to be careful. Casuistry, or comparing case to case, is not the way Orthodoxy knows truth. It is a teaching point, that if we can think of similar cases, it does illustrate the point very well. And, yes, although there are other issues with organ transplantation that we don’t have time to get into, we do have people that are murdered, that are shot in the head or are declared brain-dead, and they are organ donors, and they do [donate] organs. So that we can potentially benefit from a murdered person seems not to violate things.

Because we view our current culture wars through the lens of abortion often, that we don’t want to participate in abortion in any way, I think is a good starting spot, but I think we can set the moral bar too high, by wanting—by seeking a reality that doesn’t exist, a reality that, again, if you want a completely ethically pure world or an ethically pure medicine, you’re not going to find it.

Fr. John: Right. So those who are just listening in, Fr. John Parker, the Dean of St. Tikhon’s Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, talking with Dr. Ryan Sampson Nash, medical doctor and faithful Orthodox Christian on the question of COVID and specifically on the vaccines. In case you have just started to listen in, I think it’s very important to restate some points that Dr. Nash has made, which include: he and we are fervent in our defense of human life, the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death. The question of the bioethical or medical-ethical realities of the human embryonic kidney cells that were used in the formation of some of the vaccines is questionable, but the main point is: almost all of our life is tainted. Well, our life is tainted by sin, but so much medicine in all of recent memory is tainted by the use of those cell lines, everything from metformin all the way down to vitamin D, and we just have to be nuanced in how we raise these particular questions.

Dr. Nash, we are about ten minutes from the time we said we would take calls, so let’s be conscious of that, and maybe move on to talk specifically about mRNA vaccines, and if you want to jump in from there to start talking about the potential harms from the vaccines and potential mandates that we might see because the FDA approved today at least one vaccine. Let’s start talking in those very direct ways, and then we can start taking our calls in about ten minutes at 855-237-2346.

Dr. Nash: Right. The mRNA technology is a new technology. It’s not completely new. Moderna was a company formed to make such technology. It may be a technology that gets the next Nobel prize, or at least one in the near future. mRNA technology has been… When I first heard of the technology, I had a good scientific skepticism, and I’ve been won over by the data that this is safe and effective. Now, safety and efficacy in medicine does not mean 100% safe, nor does it mean 100% effective. The mRNA vaccines have also been touted as this new genetic manipulation, but they mimic the way a virus works. A virus goes into the cell—depending on what kind of virus it is—now, we’ll [not] go into the details; you can easily discover them—but the mRNA vaccines work in a way similar to the way a virus does, except you’re not going to get an infection. There’s no… You can’t get the virus from this portion of mRNA.

I won’t go into more details on that. Again, the idea that this is new genetic manipulation therapy is false. This is a new mRNA technology, but most of the vaccines are using some sort of genetically modified viron or something like that, where they take out the ability—they genetically manipulate the ability for the virus to replicate so you don’t get infected. In the early vaccine days, and still with some vaccines, there’s a potential for getting the disease it’s trying to prevent. And the sad reality of some vaccinated for polio would come down with polio, and that was a known risk. It was a risk that was deemed worthy of still giving the vaccines at that time. The current vaccines do not give that kind of illness.

Now, I’m just going to go through a list of some of the things I’ve encountered from vaccine skeptics, and I have followed the anti-vax movement. I was an autism researcher in the late 1990s, and I was around when the first autism link was supposedly made that became known as one of the great frauds in medicine that was fraudulent data that tried to link autism with certain vaccines, and I have followed [the] anti-vax movement, and I have actually defended some anti-vaxxers and the ability to say no to medicine and mandates. But I’ll say… Let’s just get a quick list of things that I’ve encountered.

I’ve been sent documents or things suggesting Bill Gates was trying to do population control, ala Thanos of the Marvel series. Accusations of nanochipping. There is no nanochip in the device—there’s no nanochip in the vaccine. There’s no device such as this. Again, the population control conspiracy theory.

Early on, there were people concerned that luciferase, this certainly diabolical enzyme being was in the vaccine and this was proof of the mark of the beast. And this comes from some of the purveyors of the web-Orthodox anti-vax movement. Well, lucifares is the enzyme that emits light. It is what makes lightning bugs light up. I don’t think they’re diabolical; I think they’re quite lovely, actually. [Laughter] And in science they’re used as a fluorescent in experiments, and luciferase is not in the vaccines. They were used in some of the trials, so you could watch and see how and where the vaccine goes.

There have been claims that we don’t know the ingredients. Even some Orthodox monks have started their video where they say we shouldn’t take it by [saying], “We don’t know the ingredients.” Well, the ingredients list is on every informed consent, which— every vaccine given has an informed consent that actually does go through the approval and the side effects and all these things in it. And it has an ingredients list, and the ingredients are confirmed by multiple independent groups. So we do know what’s in them.

I’ve been challenged that it changes your DNA, that we’re all going to become some sort of chimeras. This is not true in the least. There’s the conspiracy of hiding harms, whether it will sterilize people, all these things. Usually this is very, very selective use of some science, but very selective. They ignore whole studies on the safety and efficacy. In many ways, there has been the first case of someone dying from something like an immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, a physician in Florida—it makes the front pages.

When someone has [been] harmed by the vaccine, it is one of the most scrutinized treatments we’ve ever had in medicine—I think rightly so! It needs to be scrutinized because it is so new, and it was approved so quickly. But it wasn’t approved in a rushed way. A normal trial for a vaccine or for another drug would have a sample size much lower than the sample size that was used for approving these vaccines—we’re talking about 30,000; 40,000; 60,000 people in the trials. And the trials, they were intensive, they were very large, and the logic behind how these vaccines could be approved quickly is that most vaccine untoward effects or most harms from a vaccine occur in the first two months. The ideas of… A sober scientist is going to tell you we don’t know the long-term effects beyond the year, because we don’t have more than a year’s worth of data—but we do have an experience that vaccines generally don’t cause long-term effects beyond two months. That’s been our experience. It doesn’t mean that there’s zero risk, but it’s very, very low.

And, related to that, there have been posts on things like adverse events reporting and harms to patients that have received the vaccine. Again, this is one of the most scrutinized treatments ever given—preventative treatments, or treatments, both. And that the government— This is… I’m only talking about the US experience; I’m not talking about worldwide, but the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, or VAERS, and the V-safe system, the government requires hospitals and medical professionals to report anything bad that happens to someone who has received a vaccine. They’re not asking for a hospital to decipher whether this is vaccine-caused or not.

Fr. John: That’s an important detail.

Dr. Nash: That’s important, and I’ll give you an example for that, but first I’ll also mention that every person who receives the vaccine is given the opportunity to report anything that they feel, side effect-wise or any complication they have themselves, through the V-safe system, or they can contact VAERS directly, and all that data is put together. One of the thing that happens there is the data is scrubbed for redundancy, because you can imagine if a physician reports and a nurse practitioner reports and the hospital reports and a patient reports, there will be some redundancy.

But I’ll share, we had one patient at our Ohio State vaccine center who was in their 80s who had a stroke in the parking lot of the vaccine station. And we were able to respond, got them to the hospital, but the added part is that it was before that person received a vaccine. If it was a minute after the person received a vaccine, they would have been reported as a vaccine adverse event. So the job for FDA and CDC in the vaccine adverse event reporting is to look at all these data and see if it meets the background data.

So, for instance, last I looked at the data, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System reported something like 13% miscarriage rate among women who were pregnant, and it’s been reported that, oh, this is causing—it’s been reporting by more of the skeptical sites that this is clear evidence that it’s causing miscarriage—but the background data is that miscarriage can happen in 10-16% of pregnancies. That’s why the FDA and CDC say it’s not likely related to the vaccine; it’s happening anyway. And then if you think of a vaccine that preferentially was given to people with chronic disease and advanced age, even nursing home patients, you have to consider the background incidence of disease. So if someone scrolls through a list of people who have died and who have received a vaccine, we have to question: Is it from the vaccine or is it from something else?

And that level of scrutiny isn’t happening among a lot of these voices within Orthodoxy that are so vaccine-hesitant and skeptical. Ironically, these are the same people that are very skeptical about the COVID numbers being inflated, which is a different topic altogether, but they’re not applying their same level of scrutiny to both sides.

Fr. John: Dr. Nash, as we invite people to call 855-237-2346—you’re welcome to call in now: 855-237-2346, if you wish to ask a question of Dr. Nash—while we’re waiting for that first call, if one will come in, let me ask you to talk about mandates and FDA approval. There is one question that came in through the YouTube channel apparently, that said there are reports there are 12,297 deaths from vaccines: how do we explain that kind of thing? May we talk a little bit about that? And I do know that we have three calls waiting.

Dr. Nash: Yeah, the 12,000 number is the number from the VAERS system, the number of people who have died who have received the vaccine. That’s not the number of people who have died from the vaccine. Again, there was a, to give a corollary, there was a big hullabaloo about people dying from COVID and people dying with COVID. If someone was in a car accident who happened to test positive in the emergency department and it was put down as a COVID death, that was a real scandal. I think it was a scandal that was greatly overblown. What I was seeing in hospital systems were people dying from pulmonary disease from COVID, and I saw just as much underreporting of COVID as I did overreporting.

But here we have deaths that are reported that are people that were vaccinated, but it is not determined that there’s a link. CDC is continually updating… This is some things. Their public response… I’ve never been for lockdowns, and there’s some other things that it could go into as far as public health policy and prevention where I thought they overstepped, but their therapeutics for both treatments for people with COVID and their vaccine assessment I think has been very, very sound. So CDC is very transparent when they find a link. For instance, Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the risk of transverse myelitis, a neurologic condition, has been released; it’s not hidden. The Pfizer FDA approval that just happened has mention that those under 20, young males especially, have a risk of myocarditis or pericarditis, of an inflammation of the heart and the lining of the heart. Almost all those cases completely recover. And I mentioned COVID has a much higher chance of causing the same thing, much, much worse. So your risks of dying from myocarditis are much higher if you’re not vaccinated than if you’re vaccinated. So the risk assessment here is key.

Again, if you take—if you just look at nursing homes, the average life expectancy for someone who’s in nursing home is pretty low, so if you vaccinate 100% of the residents of a nursing home, and 80% of them have died within a year and a half, all of those are going to be reported as potential vaccine adverse events—but almost all of them didn’t die from the vaccine at all; it’s actually… This is the hyperscrutiny that the CDC and FDA are using. They’re trying to gather all this data just so they can find patterns just in case they’re missing something. So, again, you have to pay attention to those numbers very carefully.

Fr. John: Gotcha. Dr. Nash, Christina in Miami, Florida, has been waiting very patiently, so maybe, with Bobby Maddex’s help, we could ask Christina to come online and ask her question.

Sam: Hello?

Fr. John: Hello. Maybe it’s not Christina. Go ahead.

Sam: No, no, I’m Sam. Probably the name comes out with my wife’s phone. [Laughter]

Fr. John: Welcome. Well, tell us your name, sir.

Sam: Sam.

Fr. John: Sam, thank you for calling. Please ask your question to Dr. Nash.

Sam: Well, very quickly, you were talking about the important features and the study and the fact that we use the vaccine with that, and the murder victim that is an organ donor. Already there, if you look from Orthodoxy, and forgive me if I use this in that—one is an unwilling victim, because it didn’t have even a chance to say, “Okay, I want to donate myself to my neighbor,” let’s say. The other is a murder victim; okay, it’s been a victim, but before that fatal accident, let’s say, or whatever happened, he or she had the opportunity to say, “I can donate my organs.”

So that’s one big problem. And of course we can discuss as long as we want about that, but there is something there that is not right. It reminds me of the cult of Baal—I’m sorry, I’m not no-vax, I’m not these crazy people with the theories and stuff like that, but I see this, even in the Bible, if you want to, this kind of parallel where we’re using fetuses to do something that’s not right at the end of the day. I mean there it is tough. Alternative ways are okay. So that’s one question.

The other thing, if you don’t mind, the mandate: what I find—and again, please, I’m not a no-vax and I’m not into conspiracy theories or anything like that—but the mandates don’t work, because instead of an act of love, where, okay, I want to protect my family, I want to protect my neighbor or whatever, I’m imposed by some bureaucrat to take a vaccine and to use something against my will in my body. So we are going against our Orthodoxy where we say we cannot… We are against abortion. Why are we using, then, our bodies…?

Dr. Nash: No, I understand.

Fr. John: Thank you for those questions.

Dr. Nash: Yeah, I understand the questions. I mean, quickly, the case of organ transplantation is not my proof; it’s someone else’s proof. And I’m not going to defend the use of fetal tissue from an abortion from any purpose. Now, what I’m saying is I recognize that I live in a reality where that is very common. It’s very common in the biopharma research, biomedical research realm. Similar things are common in cosmetics and food supply. And that we’re aware of them doesn’t mean that we have to live in an isolated hermit life. We just… This is what the cleansing of the Church is for, the daily prayers of God giving mercy and forgiving us for sins voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge or in ignorance, etc.

Now the mandates—I’m a Texan, so if you tell me that I have to do something, it makes me not want to do it all the more. [Laughter] I don’t like mandates. So the challenge with the mandates right now is the transmissibility data is a little bit mixed. I don’t want to spend too much on it, but I can tell you that mandates by law in the United States are very clear: mandates are allowed. So from court precedent from 1905 on, mandates from employers, mandates from civil authorities can be done. So it’s going to be, again, something that… I value liberty; I value choice. I actually think mandates can be counter-productive and entrench people into a position that even if it’s based on misinformation just by you making me do it, it will entrench that position, but mandates are going to be here, and now that the Pfizer vaccine is FDA approved, and Moderna probably will be in the next weeks, in short weeks—I don’t know the timeline for J&J, but the mandates will be upon us.

What you do with that, I think, you can be entrenched and you can say, “This doesn’t work; I’m against this”; you can be like me, an arrogant Texan, who says, “If you tell me I have to do it, I don’t want to do it all the more”; or you may relent and look at the science soberly. I think that’s a choice. But if you choose not to be vaccinated, you will probably deal with consequences of that. And those legally, based on case law, case precedent within the US, the law is going to say the mandate stands.

Fr. John: Thank you for your call, and, Dr. Nash, thank you for that answer. We’re going to turn now to a call coming in from the Bronx, New York. Bobby, can you help us take that call, please? Thanks for calling in. This is Fr. John. Please ask your question to Dr. Nash. Tell us your name, please.

Manuel: Hello?

Fr. John: Hello. You’re on Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s. Please tell us your name and ask us your question for Dr. Nash.

Manuel: Sure. My name is Manuel. I’m calling with a broad question. I wanted to know what is the mentality or what you think about all these podcasts coming out on YouTube from random, make-pretend theologians and these clergy going online, posting random Athonite quotes against a vaccine and saying that if you get the vaccine you have the mark of the beast and some kind of a microchip and something like that. What is your view on that?

Fr. John: Dr. Nash, will you allow me to take that one?

Dr. Nash: Yeah, I can say something, but I’ll let you start! [Laughter]

Fr. John: Sure. I’ll just take a quick point. The purpose of this particular interview for this hour is to talk about the medical matters related to the COVID vaccine, and I hope that all who are listening will be willing to take that medical information from an Orthodox Christian doctor and bioethicist and apply it to decisions in his or her own life. It is certainly a major complication of our day to have that kind of information out there constantly. We simply… I would simply encourage people to make sure that they understand the perspective from someone like Dr. Nash who is trained in these particular areas. This is not to contradict those who have, as Dr. Nash began the podcast by saying those who are pure of heart… Nevertheless, in our case, for example, we are following the encouragement of our primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon, and the synod of bishops of our Church in the way that we live and act here.

So I will say that personally one of the greatest reliefs I’ve received in recent life was to unfollow certain— Well, I unfollowed everyone on Facebook except for my wife, and I stopped looking at the 24-hour news cycle. I think if every one of us would do that, we’d find ourselves healthier. But, Dr. Nash, go ahead and take a stab at the question, if you will, and then we’ll take a call from—

Dr. Nash: Well, I think actually what I was going to say… I think one of the greatest public health crises in our time is the addiction to social media and electronics. I would encourage all Orthodox Christians to find a good, wise priest, to go to as many services as possible, to keep their daily prayer rule, and seek wisdom that way, and to turn the news loop off, turn social media off, and seek—don’t seek theological or medical information from the web. That’s my advice.

I mean, I do teach and think the right way of knowing the Orthodox… the Orthodox phronema, the Orthodox ethos, the Orthodox ethic, if you will, is by cleansing oneself. And the wisdom from holy Fathers and contemporary saints is to be heeded. But when I see a post of someone saying something that I know is verifiably false, based on the science and medicine, and then going on to making it spiritual, it makes me question their discernment on that. I think there’s a challenge, though. I want to try to compartmentalize as much as possible that they may be wrong on this, deceived, but I’m not going to say they’re universally wrong. I know some of these characters, and I think they are doing what they think is best. I think they’re deceived by some misinformation on the web, and I would encourage people to be very, very, very careful about what you look at and what you feed your soul with. Read St. John of Kronstadt on what you expose yourself with. And if you watch some of the videos from some of these so-called experts that are the skeptics, and if you can’t see the passion within them, I mean, just look for the tell-tale signs of people being deceived. I think you’ll see them.

Fr. John: Manuel, thank you for calling. Let’s turn our attention to, I believe, David who’s calling from Houston, Texas.

Nick: Hello?

Fr. John: Hello. Fr. John Parker. You’re live on Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s with Dr. Nash. Please tell us your name—and is this David?

Nick: Well, it is. I go by my middle name, which is Nick. It must be my cell phone has me listed as my first. I’m calling from Nashville, actually.

Fr. John: Well, there you go.

Dr. Nash: So here I am. So my question pertains to speaking lovingly with a relative who is staunchly anti-vax and who is kind of swimming in a lot of the misinformation that is so, you know, ubiquitous. It’s been a struggle for me. It’s my mom, so it’s particularly painful, because I want to honor the commandments, but I also am concerned for my mom. Arguments get very ugly very easily, and so… If that makes sense…

Dr. Nash: No, it makes complete sense.

Fr. John: If it’s all right, Dr. Nash, let me just take one. Let me give the answer to this one for now. And, Nick, please forgive me for giving a very short answer. I think that the first answer is prayer; that’s one thing we learn from Fr. Sergius, the abbot here at the monastery. Prayer first in everything. So stand in your icon corner, pray for your mother, ask the Mother of God to intercede for your mother, and don’t try to convince your mother of anything unless she asks you. Those are words from Fr. Thomas Hopko. It’s very rare that we can change someone’s idea by rational argument. So a short answer, but pray for your mom, ask the Mother of God to intercede on behalf of your mother, and only try to convince her if she asks you. Okay?

Nick: Yeah.

Fr. John: Thanks for calling in, David. Let’s turn… The lines are lighting up and we have about 14 minutes left in our time together. Let’s turn to Howard—I think Howard Lang is calling in from California. Howard?

Mr. Howard Lang: Ah, yes. Hello.

Fr. John: Hello, Howard. Welcome to the program. Are you the Howard Lang who, once upon a time, worked for Fr. Peter Gillquist?

Mr. Lang: As far as I recall, yes.

Fr. John: Yes, you were instrumental in my conversion to Orthodoxy, so I thank you for that, and we can talk about it later, but share your question for Dr. Nash, if you will.

Mr. Lang: Okay, thank you, Father. Dr. Nash, I had two questions. One, one of the concerns that I have had, rumors I have heard of the CDC or the FDA, one of the two of them being in bed, if you will, with one of the manufacturers of the vaccine—I think it was either Pfizer or Moderna—that they are co-owning the vaccine somehow. I was hoping you might be able to speak to that somehow, in some way. And then the second question is simply: Which of the three vaccines would you recommend, and why?

Dr. Nash: Okay, excellent questions. Thank you. So just to give you context, I’ve given testimony on the inadequacy of some FDA safeguards, so it’s a system I know pretty well. There’s also several books written on FDA failures and biopharmaceutical failures. I’ve given some testimony on some of those failures. All that said, around the 1990s, there was a movement to try to distance from some of the conflicts of interest at FDA. There were movements—actually an OSU faculty person in the 1960s and ‘70s was exposing some scandals in antimicrobial use and over-prescribing of antibiotics in medicine. So know that there are scandals along the way.

The ties here from financial gains… There’s a lot of interconnected webs within biomedicine. It would be pretty easy to create a narrative of events. I’m not going to say everything’s pure, but the data—most… I’ll point out that all these previous FDA scandals have been pointed out by the biomedical establishment, by academics who look at the data, look at the conflicts, and the data here is pretty sound. So the money—“follow the money” is one of the most common ethics arguments around, but I’ll point out that if you follow the money for natural news that’s trying to sell— or Alex Jones. Alex Jones makes millions of dollars a year selling vitamins, and his so-called journals that he calls upon are all from the same source, basically, and he’s profiting millions and millions from gullible conservatives. And others are profiting from this as well. The supplement market— I take supplements. That’s a different conversation, what supplements are justified and not, but the supplement market is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and a lot of the websites are also charging memberships and other things. So it’s hard to escape the quandary of profit and money.

What vaccines do I recommend? I generally recommend the Moderna or Pfizer in the US. I like them. I think their safety and efficacy numbers look a little better than the J&J. The J&J also was produced on HEK cell lines, so it’s one level distanced: where the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not produced on the HEK cell line, and they only did post-production research with those cell lines, so that’s my preference. I think that the two are essentially equal. There may be some data that suggests that Moderna may be a little better, but these comparative studies may be a little bit difficult because of the timing and the populations they were done in vary somewhat, although the Moderna dosage is a little higher, so it’s possible that they may be a little more effective. But this is an ongoing are of inquiry, so all that recommendations is really subject to change.

Fr. John: Howard, thank you very much for calling in. If I could ask you a personal favor, send me an email at dean—d-e-a-n—at stots—s-t-o-t-s—dot e-d-u, I’d love to tell you my story and how you helped me get here.

Mr. Lang: I’d be happy to do that.

Fr. John: Thanks for calling in today. We’re going to turn our attention to Gabriella in Philadelphia who is calling to ask a question I think about natural immunity. Gabriella, are you with us?

Gabriella: Yes. Can you hear me?

Fr. John: Thank you for calling in. Yes, I can hear you. Please share your question with Dr. Nash.

Gabriella: Hello. Hello, everyone. I would like to see what is better and what is your opinion about mandating the vaccine, any vaccine, to people who went through naturally this, have natural immunity. And we all know that natural immunity is much, much better and with a broad range of sensitivities compared toward any vaccine-given immunity. So to me it looks like mandating is more important than the scientific fact of having the immunity.

Fr. John: Dr. Nash, talk about natural immunity and the vaccine.

Dr. Nash: I mean, yeah, “natural immunity” is kind of a misnomer. We should have “vaccine-induced immunity” and “infection-induced immunity,” because both types of immunity are using your natural immunity, if you will, so it’s a little bit of a misnomer. It’s one that we use in medicine, so I don’t fault its use, but we should know that it’s the same immune system and very similar responses with both. I’ll agree with… So I think one of the exemptions that should be allowed, for the time being, in mandates is if someone has a previous exposure and has potentially a natural immunity; I think that’s one of the potential open areas in science we know, but I do disagree with the statement that we know natural immunity is better, because actually we… there’s a lot of data saying the opposite.

Natural immunity depends on what kind of infection you had, what kind of reaction you had. People that had moderate to severe disease often have longer lasting immunity. I deal with immunocompromised advanced breast cancer population. Their ability to have natural immunity may be limited. This is one of the reasons why FDA and CDC are giving authorization for immunocompromised patients to get a third dose, not a booster in their case, but a third dose. There’s also evidence that someone who has post-infection immunity, if they get a dose of the vaccine, has increased immunity that’s better.

So I guess the best answer I can give is that there’s still a lot of things we don’t know about natural immunity and the vaccine. For instance, there are studies going on whether you received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, if you had an infection in the past, is it better—is one dose enough? Is two doses enough? Those are studies that will be coming out, that will be forthcoming. And I’ve advised some people that I know that had moderate to severe disease that they could wait until that study comes out so maybe they only get one dose of the vaccine. And I do think that for some population the post-infection or natural immunity may be sufficient, but it’s something really you don’t know, and right now the data’s really showing that in a lot of populations, the natural immunity is shorter-lived than the vaccine-induced immunity, but it’s so variable among different populations that there’s—again, there’s so much we don’t know.

I wish that we had, from a data perspective, not a liberty and privacy perspective, but from a data perspective, I wish we had far more surveillance, kind of—antibody studies, although antibodies only gives one part of the immune system. There’s a memory, cellular immunity, that may be much longer-lived. So what you’re seeing right now in the data is… In the media people are saying the Delta variant, the vaccines are less effective. That’s effective against infection or symptomatic infection; the vaccines are still very effective for preventing moderate to severe disease and death. And that prevention of moderate to severe disease and death is likely related to the cellular memory immunity and not just antibodies, so even antibodies don’t tell you the whole story. So a lot of the immunity trials are just looking at antibodies, which is a proxy for immunity.

And the applied scientist in me… I have to qualify all kinds of things, but currently we don’t have any evidence to suggest that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, and we have some evidence for this illness that that may not be true. There are other illnesses that natural immunity, post-infection immunity, is much superior to the vaccine. So it really depends on the illness.

Fr. John: Gabriella, thank you very much for calling in today. I hope that was an answer to your question, at least a start. Indeed, we are grateful to everyone who has called in. I wish—I’m sure I speak for Dr. Nash—I wish our time permitted us another two or three hours, because I know that we could go through some serious additional questions. I’d like Dr. Nash to raise one with you as we put the landing gear down and take our aim toward the runway. Someone wrote in on the YouTube channel of Ancient Faith Radio: “I have an autoimmune disease, so I’ve hesitated getting the vaccine. Was this a wise decision?” Could you talk a little bit about— You mentioned it briefly in your answer to Gabriella—talk a little bit about autoimmune disease and maybe not getting vaccinated.

Dr. Nash: I think generally people with autoimmune disease, if they’re on immune-suppressant drugs, I would time that with the rheumatologist. So if they’re on immuno-suppressant drugs, sometimes they can get a drug-free holiday where they would have a better immune response. So I do think that people with autoimmune disease and people with cancer, other immuno-suppressing diseases, talking to their medical specialist about the vaccine and the timing of their vaccine is the right approach. There are people with hyper-sensitivities and others that probably shouldn’t get the vaccine, so, again, talking to your trusted healthcare provider if you have one, but in a case of autoimmune disease, I’d coordinate that with your rheumatologist.

I mean, Fr. John, one comment. You mentioned at the beginning St. Innocent story. I do want to say: vaccines are not new. Medicines are not new. There are unique aspects of modern medicine and modern vaccines, but in my best discernment these vaccines don’t differ wholly different than other vaccines that Orthodoxy has not rebelled against in the past. One of the… In most of the talks I’ve given through the year, though I’m a conservative—I’m conservative politically; I’m traditionalist theologically—I have tried to dispel the myth of COVID vaccine exceptionalism. Just like the COVID vaccines are not exceptional when it comes to HEK cell use, because those are almost ubiquitous, the COVID vaccines aren’t that different from other vaccines, even the mRNA. And the medical decision around the vaccine is—my favorite bishop’s statement is Vladyka Luke’s of Syracuse at Jordanville, where he says that this is no different than any other medical decision.

Now, it does—all medical decisions, like you said at the beginning in the opening, have potential spiritual impact, but this one isn’t any different than other medical decisions, and anti-vax conspiracy, anti-vax information, and Orthodox being afraid or concerned about technological innovations—none of that is new. So in many ways, it’s not a new problem, and I think those who know that the medicine is tainted and the world that we live in is tainted, we have to realize the sinfulness that is around us and within us and seek the healing of the Church in its fullness as the true path of healing. I thank you for asking me to join you today.

Fr. John: Dr. Nash, it has been a sincere pleasure to have you on The Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s today. We remind ourselves that we are called to commend ourselves and each other and all our life unto Christ our God. Whether the Lord takes us today or heals us today and takes us on a different day, we ask him to look over us, on our families, on our land, and to grant us to be faithful to him until the very end, whether we are vaccinated or unvaccinated, all to the glory of God and to the love of our neighbor whom we can see. Dr. Nash, thank you. All who have been listening, thank you. And we’ll see you next time, or talk to you next time on The Spirit of Saint Tikhon’s.