A senior Catholic bishop has warned that if a significant number of people refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine, more people may lose their lives to the virus.

Writing in The Irish Catholic Bishop Kevin Doran reassures the Faithful that there is nothing in Church teaching to prevent them from taking a vaccine, even if it was developed using cell-lines from aborted babies.

“Catholics are free,” he writes, “to use any Covid-19 vaccine that is approved for clinical use, on the understanding that they themselves do not approve of or consent to abortion for the purposes of biomedical research”.

While Dr Doran acknowledges that a decision on taking a vaccine is a matter of individual conscience, he insists it is also not simply a private matter.

“If significant numbers of people chose not to be vaccinated, for whatever reason, it would prove very difficult to achieve the required levels of immunity in the population. The result could be significant loss of life and serious illness in the community and especially among those who are most vulnerable, as well as long-term damage to social and economic life, which would impact on the population as a whole.

“This reality must inform any judgement of conscience. Any person who wishes to signal his or her rejection of the use of foetal cell-lines should consider whether there are other ways of doing so, than by refusing to avail of the vaccine,” Bishop Doran writes.