Hospital staff must swear off Tylenol, Tums to get religious vaccine exemption

[Nevilledog]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-swear-off-tylenol-tums-to-get-religious-vaccine-exemption/

A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.

The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.

"This was significantly disproportionate to what we've seen with the influenza vaccine," Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker's Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.

"Thus," Troup went on, "we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption," he said. The form includes a list of 30 commonly used medicines that "fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines," Conway Regional said.

The list includes Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Are they going to give up Prep H after ivermectin?

Wiiiiiillllllbbbuuurrrr.

[Enter stage left]

2. No!!!! They'll probably just eat Prep H.

I understand it tastes like shit!

[SheltieLover]

9. Lol

Can't make this stuff up.

[Runningdawg]

3. Unenforceable. What are they going to do test everyone

for banned substances before every shift? Will they prosecute the offenders for breach of contract? The unvaccinated are, as of yet, not a protected class. A business does not have to accommodate them if doing so would place an undue burden on the business. They need to just pull up their big boy pants and pass out the pink slips.

[WinstonSmith4740]

21. They did it with drug testing.

Pre-employment tests, as well as random tests were pretty common. I do agree with you on it's time for business to put on their big boy pants. They keep waiting to be "forced" to do the right thing.

[Runningdawg]

30. I wonder how much it would cost to test exempt employees for one month

and how many months companies are willing to do it. I have a feeling, like the majority of drug testing, companies will only comply when their insurance underwriters requires all their employees to be vaccinated.

[Demovictory9]

4. Calling their.bluff

[ShazzieB]

17. Exactly!

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. Wow, they were using fetal cell lines in 1900 when Pepto Bismol hit the market?

I'd have never guessed.

(called Bismosal at the time, became Pepto Bismol in 1919).

[Cerridwen]

6. Interesting article. It even provides the answer to your question.

The intent of the form is twofold, Troup says. First, the hospital wants to ensure that staff members are sincere in their stated beliefs, he said, and second, it wants to "educate staff who might have requested an exemption without understanding the full scope of how fetal cells are used in testing and development in common medicines."

[Hugh_Lebowski]

7. I understand, but when you have 100+ year old medicines on the list

under these auspices ... frankly it undermines your argument pretty obviously.

[crickets]

8. Your point is well taken. I had questions about the same issue until I ran across this piece

which points out how many medications have been retested since they were first introduced. The following was written by a Catholic priest opining on the hypocrisy of objecting to vaccines that had only been tested, not manufactured, using fetal cell lines. He prepared his thoughts with the help of Dr. Lisa Gilbert, MD.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughcatholiclenses/2021/01/if-any-drug-tested-on-hek-293-is-immoral-goodbye-modern-medicine/

Dr. Gilbert also shared some info on why HEK-293 testing is so ubiquitous.

This is often used in basic research, which helps to establish how diseases cause bad effects at the cellular level, such as on the cell receptors, ion channels or protein expression and folding. This knowledge allows researchers to look for or even create new medications to counteract these specific diseases more precisely, by targeting the cause and effects of diseases at the cellular and molecular level. More directly, HEK is used to test various medications and evaluate see their effects on the cells in-vitro.

This allows safety and efficacy testing to be done in the lab before medications are given to patients in clinical trials. Or HEK call lines may be used to study old medications that are already available and FDA approved. There may be new applications for these medications; knowledge of how these medications work at the cellular level will help in targeting diseases better. These medications may also have side effects or cause interactions on cells when combined with other medications. Studying this in the lab allows for side effects to be understood and mitigated. New medications in the same class can be developed that are safer or more effective. But all of these research possibilities require living cell lines and one of the most common ones chosen for such research is HEK.

Apparently, older medications are being retested in the lab all the time, either to improve them, or to develop replacements that are just as/more effective with fewer side effects. Hope this helps.

[caraher]

31. Thanks so much

Just last night a RW Catholic friend posted some twaddle by a "Catholic bioethicist" arguing that weekly testing is a dandy alternative to a vaccine. The piece you linked really walks through the logical fail this represents and explains in detail why so many things are on that list.

[crickets]

32. Glad to hear it.

I have to admit, I almost passed over this article. Thank goodness a quick skim led to a deeper read. That the contents were so thoughtful and edifying was a welcome, pleasant surprise. Good luck with your friend.

[Ms. Toad]

10. A little searching in medical journals will disclose how many old and new drugs

are tested using the HEK lines of fetal stem cells.

Here's just one article about testing on aspirin in 2015: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26491233/

[Hugh_Lebowski]

11. That's a different argument though

These old drugs were clearly not DEVELOPED this way.

Ergo, I consider their inclusion in 'the list' ... pretty disingenuous.

That being said, I don't favor any 'religious exemptions' unless you can prove you're a practicing Christian Scientist.

[Ms. Toad]

13. The criteria was development or testing.

Testing doesn't end when the drug hit the market.

There do not have to be exceptions to generally applicable laws that incidentally impinge on religion - but if there are exceptions for religion, you can't pick and choose which religious reasons to permit.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

14. And I'm saying IMHO the company chose arbitrary criteria

in building this list.

I think it's disingenuous, though understand the 'point', I would've stuck to drugs in which fetal cell-line testing was part of the initial approval, not testing that happened 100 years afterward.

And my reasoning for allowing ANY 'religious exemption' is that the Xtian Scientists don't avail themselves of doctors and vaccines and medicines and all that kind of stuff (or at least, that's the known dogma of their religion). To me, this 'waaah there was some stem cells used in testing' doesn't pass the smell test whatsoever. They should all just be DENIED on those grounds.

You're free to feel differently, of course

[Ms. Toad]

15. From a legal perspective, if you permit religious exemptions,

you don't get to discriminate based on sect.

The more solid legal ground is to prohibit exemptions entirely based on it being a generally applicable law not directed at the suppression of religion. (The public health risk from COVID is certainly enough to justify a no-exception rule.)

[Hugh_Lebowski]

16. Okay, I'm fine with that too :) (nt)

[Dorian Gray]

24. Why, though?

If the objections is that fetal cells are being used at all by the medication, then current testing using those lines should be problematic. I don't understand your objection.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

27. Because it comes off as a trite, 'gotcha' kind of move when you include 100+ year old meds?

Whereas if you stick to other drugs where the stem cells were used in the initial development and testing for approval (like the vaccine), you're comparing apples-to-apples?

Essentially, calling these people hypocrites for taking aspirin because Dr. Pradeep Singh once conducted a test on aspirin using some stem-cells in India in 1997 (just a hypothetical example) ... is needlessly confrontational and doesn't strike me as 'fair' in this context.

To be clear, I'm not in favor any 'religious exemptions' on this basis. But I think this is a cheesy 'workaround' this company is engaging in.

You're on much firmer moral ground if you only include drugs that are consistent with the vaccine's development cycle.

[Dorian Gray]

28. I think that I totally disagree

if their objection is that aborted fetal cells being used at all is a great evil, then it's an evil at any stage.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when they're said to be used in the development of the vaccine, it was in the testing stages. Fetal stem cells are not PRESENT in the vaccine. So it's still a matter of testing at different stages.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

29. Then we can agree to disagree :) nt

[littlemissmartypants]

12. Y'all, you know they're just going to lie.

[TexasTowelie]

18. Preparation H is on the list?

I can't quite put my finger on the problem, but could somebody have confused fetal and fecal?

[marybourg]

19. They shouldn't be "swearing off". They should be

affirming that they’ve never taken these products, which are antithetical to their “religion “.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

20. These exemptions are scams

[Dorian Gray]

22. lol

There's no way they'll be able to police this, but I give them props for making them aware that they're most likely hypocrites.

I'm also sure that a small minuscule of a percentage of those people realized all those medications are made with the same cell lines. A larger percentage won't care. But there may be a handful who say: This is stupid. Why am I doing this?

[Marius25]

23. Fun fact:

Ivermectin, Hydroxoychloroquine, and Regeneron are all developed/tested using fetal cell lines.

Pro-lifers are such raging hypocrites.

[Dorian Gray]

25. Well, yeah

they politicize everything too.

[crickets]

33. +1

[SidDithers]

26. Fuck off with your religious exemption...

Your choice of what to believe the sky fairies tell you shouldn't overrule public health measures.

Sid