The video of a woman talking about the Oxford AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine and stating that the vaccine contains lung tissue from an aborted male foetus has gone viral on social media.

However, we found that the video incorrectly identifies the cell line used in the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. We also found that the claim that the vaccine “contains” aborted foetal tissue is false.

CLAIM

The video was broadcast live on 15 November on a Facebook page that advocates against vaccination. The first frame of the video shows the photo of the packaging for the AstraZeneca-developed COVID-19 vaccine ChAdOx1-S. The narrator in the video then open up a page of research done on the vaccine and reads out a part of the paper that says, “We used direct RNA sequencing to analyse transcript expression from the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 genome in human MRC-5 and A549 cell lines that are non-permissive for vector replication alongside the replication permissive cell line, HEK293”.

She infers to her viewers that the vaccine definitely has “the lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted Caucasian male foetus.”

The now-deleted Facebook video was shared by over 1,10,000 people.

The narrator repeatedly asks the viewers to share the video in their own groups and reminds them that the video could be taken down. Consequently, the video was shared by many on Twitter and other anti-vaccination websites.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

A spokesperson for the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine team told The Quint that the vaccine is “manufactured using a producer cell line, Human Embryonic Kidney 293 TREX cells”, not MRC-5 cell line as claimed in the video.

Dr David Matthews, the co-author on the vaccine study mentioned in the video told the fact-checking website Politifact that “the narrator misleadingly summarised his paper.”

Some viruses are known to grow much better in human cells. In the case of the coronavirus, the modified virus is grown in the HEK 293 cell line and then purified away to remove the cell culture material before the final product is ready. This process ensures that no human material remains in the final vaccine.

The research on standardised foetal lines began in the 1960s with monkey kidney cells. The process saw a gradual shift to human cells because they were more sterile. Since then, cell lines have been essential in developing several vaccines like hepatitis, measles and chickenpox.

Evidently, the claim in the Facebook video that there is “aborted Male foetus” in the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is false. The video has also incorrectly identified the cell line used to grow the virus for the vaccine as MRC-5.

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