Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of October 1, 2026

On the Tucker Carlson Show, lawyer Aaron Siri claimed that vaccines are made using organs taken from babies while they are still alive.

• Some vaccines use lab-grown cells descended from tissue collected in the 1960s.
• The cells are removed during vaccine production.
• The Vatican and other faith leaders support vaccination to protect people and communities.

To understand these claims, it helps to know what a cell line is and how it is used. A cell line is a group of cells grown in a lab over time. Two cell lines used to make some vaccines, WI-38 and MRC-5, began with tissue from first-term abortions in the 1960s. The cells used today come from those earlier cells. No new abortions are needed to supply these cell lines for vaccine production.

“Living cells” does not mean that a fetus is still alive. Some cells can survive for hours after a person dies. Finding living cells in tissue does not show that a fetus was kept alive for research.

These lab-grown cells help grow the viruses used in some vaccines. The cells are then removed as the vaccine is purified. Tiny pieces of DNA, the material that carries a cell’s instructions, can remain. These pieces are not whole cells or fetal tissue. Vaccines do not contain millions of fetal cells.

Even though these events happened long ago, some people still have moral concerns. In 2005, the Vatican said it is acceptable for Catholics to receive certain vaccines when they help protect health. In 2017, the Vatican explained that protecting others through vaccination is an important moral responsibility. This is even more true in 2026, when 5 people have died from measles in Pennsylvania.

Recently, leaders across many faith communities have proclaimed that protecting their communities is important.

The McCullough Foundation says flu shots make you more likely to get the flu, according to a Cleveland Clinic study.

• Different testing rates may have affected the Cleveland Clinic study’s results.
• Past flu infections and vaccines may have shaped people’s protection.
• Flu shots cannot cause flu, though they can cause mild side effects.

This Cleveland Clinic study is posted as a preprint. That means it was shared before it completed peer review, when other experts check a paper’s methods and conclusions. Its findings should be treated as early results. It’s been over a year, and this article still has not been published. Let’s look at why that is.

One concern is that vaccinated and unvaccinated people may have been tested for flu at different rates. This is called testing bias. Vaccinated people were 27% more likely to get tested, so more of their flu cases could be found. Meanwhile, cases among unvaccinated people who did not get tested could be missed. That could make the vaccinated group appear to have more flu, even if the groups’ actual infection rates were similar.

The study followed 53,402 employees. About 82% were vaccinated, and 1,130 people (about 2%) had a recorded case of flu. These numbers describe the cases found during the study. They do not tell us how many infections went untested.

Another question is how earlier flu infections and vaccines may have affected the results. The immune system can remember viruses it has met before. An earlier infection or vaccine may offer some protection against a similar flu virus in a later season. This is called cross-protection. Without a full history of past infections and vaccinations, it is harder to know how much protection people already had when the study began.

Flu shots cannot cause the flu. They contain killed viruses or parts of a virus that cannot make copies of themselves and make you sick. These ingredients teach the immune system what to recognize. A shot can cause a sore arm, mild fever, or body aches as the immune system responds, but those side effects are different from a flu infection.

In an interview with Alex Jones, Sherri Tenpenny says that during studies on COVID vaccines on animals, every animal died.

• Animal tests on COVID vaccines showed protection against the virus.
• Some animal and human studies ran at the same time, and the FDA reviewed the results before allowing emergency use.
• COVID vaccines lower the risk of severe illness and death.

Two claims about COVID vaccines conflict with each other: that animal testing was skipped and that all the animals died during testing. Published studies show that animal tests did take place. They found that vaccines helped protect the animals against the virus. We know that the animals did not die from vaccination by looking at the study itself..

Some animal studies took place while human trials were also underway. Running studies at the same time helped researchers move faster while checking safety and how well the vaccines worked.

Before the FDA allowed emergency use, it reviewed evidence from vaccine testing. Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA, allowed vaccines to be used during the health emergency after they met the required standards. Researchers continued to study their safety after they became available.

Since then, billions of people have received COVID vaccines. Studies show that these vaccines lower the risk of severe illness and death. Serious side effects are rare.