Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk

Virginia health commissioner Dr. Norman Oliver told a local news station in August 2020 that he planned to mandate COVID-19 immunizations for Virginians once a vaccine becomes available to the public. The following day, the governor, Ralph Northam, pulled rank on the commissioner and announced there would be no vaccine mandate after all. The Health Department walked back the commissioner’s earlier comments while the governor’s office issued a statement focusing on vaccine accessibility and fair distribution, not a mandate.

To sanction or encourage certain wrongful actions, it is often necessary to manipulate language. The plain meaning of words can get in the way of convincing others they should tolerate or participate in wrongdoing, or otherwise embrace situations of evil or injustice. Verbal obfuscation becomes necessary to veil evident moral truths.

Creating a new vaccine and bringing it to market typically requires more than a decade of research and clinical testing. Many companies and research groups are working overtime to shorten this timeline dramatically in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Mother Teresa visited New Bedford, Massachusetts, in June 1995, she told those of us gathered at St. Lawrence Martyr Church: “Abortion is the greatest evil of today.” Never one to mince words, Mother Teresa’s courage, truthfulness and charity were palpable. Parents today need similar fortitude, honesty and love to be able to discuss the hard topic of unplanned pregnancies and abortion with their children.

Probably the biggest bioethics story of 2019 involved Dr. Jankui He (known to his associates as “JK”), a Chinese scientist who employed a new technology called CRISPR/Cas9 to produce the world’s first gene-edited babies. JK made genetic changes to two little girls, Lulu and Nana, when they were early-stage embryos, attempting to modify a receptor for HIV to confer resistance to a possible future infection from the virus. He publicly announced the birth of the girls at an international scientific conference near the end of 2018, and as the news rapidly spread, many scientists and commentators expressed shock and dismay over his “designer baby” experiments.