"“Other vaccines are produced in a completely morally non-objectionable way. So why aren’t we doing this with all vaccines?” says Debi Vinnedge, the executive director of Children of God for Life, a group based in Largo, Florida, that opposes the use of WI-38 in vaccine-making. In 2003, Vinnedge wrote to the Vatican asking for an official position on whether Catholics could ethically receive vaccines made using cells from aborted fetuses. She waited two years for an answer. The letter, when it came, concluded that where no alternative exists, it is “lawful” for parents to have their children immunized with vaccines made using WI-38 and MRC-5, to avoid serious risk to their own offspring and to the population as a whole. Still, the Vatican wrote, faithful Catholics should “employ every lawful means in order to make life difficult for the pharmaceutical industries” that use such cells. Merck, a major producer of Plotkin’s rubella vaccine, has been a perennial target of abortion opponents, who have pressed the issue at Merck’s US shareholder meetings. (Merck said in a statement to Nature that “it would be exceedingly difficult, if at all possible, to develop and test an alternative”, and emphasized the vaccine’s long record of safety and effectiveness.) The irony of the protest is not lost on Plotkin. “I am fond of saying that rubella vaccine has prevented thousands more abortions than have ever been prevented by Catholic religionists,” he says."