The president of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, Rino Fisichella, has defended that when a vaccine is obtained to prevent the disease of COVID-19, it should be universal because “there cannot be a geographical area that is privileged and another that suffers because it is poor”.
“We are facing a pandemic and facing a situation that affects the entire world. Therefore, there cannot be a geographical area that is privileged and another that suffers because it is poor,” he said when asked about the ongoing projects to achieve a vaccine. and the possibility of it being sold to other countries.
“Science needs ethical rules or principles to abide by,” Fisichella has defended. In this sense, he has indicated that he requests an ethical principle so that science does not give “answers” moved only by “partial interests”. In this way, he recalled that when laboratories identified valid therapies and cures for the AIDS virus, “they were sold at impossible prices in Africa,” which is one of the poorest areas on the planet.
The Italian bishop has stressed that the image that God has “does not know skin color and does not know the bank account.”
Fisichella made these considerations during the presentation in the Vatican press room of the Pope’s message for the fourth World Day of Poverty organized by the Catholic Church for the upcoming November 15.
The Italian bishop has pointed out that it is “an invitation” to Christians to “get rid of indifference” and to recover “solidarity and love”. “The Pope’s message is an invitation to get rid of the indifference and the feeling of annoyance towards the poor, to recover the solidarity and love that live from generosity giving meaning to life,” he said.
The Pope starts in his message for the World Day of the Poor of the Book of Syracid, one of the wise deuterocanonicals of the Old Testament, to point out that the questions asked by its protagonist are the same ones that have marked the lives of millions of people in these months of coronavirus. “The disease, grief, uncertainty of science, pain, the lack of freedoms to which he is accustomed, the sadness of not being able to say goodbye to people,” Fisichella has listed.
