You started and perpetuated multiple flamewars in this thread. That's criminal negligence if not arson. Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules in the future? Note these:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Flesh of murdered babies" is an extreme violation of these rules. The internet is flammable and we ban accounts that blow threads up in this way, so please don't do it again.
Here's what I'd like you to understand: when you're talking to a large online audience, many of whom don't share your views, blasting them with extreme rhetoric has no persuasive value and does no good for the cause you care about. Indeed, it has an anti-persuasive effect and actually hurts the cause that you care about, as well as damaging the community here.
The fact that you use the term "flesh of murdered babies" to refer to embryonic stem cells, which even the Catholic Church simply refers to as "aborted fetal cell lines", indicates that you've bought way too heavily into the right-wing American culture war.
But anyhow, to answer your question despite the terrible way it was asked, no, the Moderna vaccine did not use embryonic stem cells in its development or production. Some partners, such as NIAID, did use embryonic stem cells for in-vitro testing of the vaccine: http://phillycatholiclife.org/life-affirming-choices-3/covid..., but the Catholic church does not consider that to make the Moderna vaccine unethical, as it's its direct development and production have never involved the use of embryonic stem cells.
Flamebait and flamewar rightly get flagged. If you had something substantive and thoughtful to say on the topic, it might have been different (hard to say), but you didn't even try.
I have not flagged any of your posts, but remember that "free speech" means freedom from government interference with speech, not freedom from a particular community deciding that your speech is disruptive to that community.
I notice looking through your comment history that you spend a lot of time discussing abortion and gun control, the two primary culture war wedge issues in American politics, and which are mostly off-topic for a technology and startup focused discussion site.
I tried to answer your question in good faith, and hope that you appreciate the information, but I don't really think this is the best forum for discussing the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.
As someone who believes abortion is entirely ethical, I don’t really like the framing of your statement - but yes there are ways to obtain embryonic stem cells that don’t involve abortion - specifically the unused embryos from IVF
You’re making a choice to see fetal tissue as a baby or an unborn child - something that is not in any way inherently true.
Since there are opposing strongly held viewpoints on abortion and neither can be proven to be more correct than the other - neutral language seems like the best way forward.
You can claim the language is biased, but as a medical procedure it’s coded in all the same language as any other medical procedure - which seems to me to be the neutral thing to do. How you feel about the emotional or moral content of a medical procedure is separate from what is done.
To take a less emotional example - I think genetically modified organisms are basically a bad thing, but that doesn’t make the term wrong - calling them monsterplants would make me happy but it’s not more accurate and it linguistically enforces a viewpoint that is not “correct” just because i happen to hold it (for many nuanced reasons i won’t go into here)
