When President Trump emerged triumphant (and with a mysteriously swollen right eye) from his 3-day stay at Walter Reed Hospital, he performed a dramatic sales pitch for Regeneron on the White House lawn, proclaiming his illness as "a blessing from God" and touting the Regeneron monoclonal antibody infusion he had received as "a miracle cure".
After his proclamation, Trump was immediately pounced on by the Left who sneered that the pro-life hero POTUS used a monoclonal antibody cocktail produced with the use of humanized mice which are created by the infusion of human fetal cells from aborted babies. Dr. Eugene Gu, outspoken social justice activist and notorious fetal researcher, made waves with this astonishing claim about Regeneron:
The well-known pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute instantly leaped to Trump's defense and stated in their October 6, 2020 press release that:
The president was not given any medicines to treat COVID-19 that involved the destruction of human life. No human embryonic stem cells or human fetal tissue were used to produce the treatments President Trump received–period.
CLI goes on in their press release to explain how Regeneron's VelocImmune mice were humanized:
Development of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail is detailed in the journal Science, describing how they identified their antibodies made from Velocimmune mice and blood from recovered patients previously infected with SARS-CoV-2. The final antibody pair used in the REGN-COV2 therapy cocktail was then produced in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells.
However, CLI's claims directly contradicted Regeneron's own press release, a fact pointed out by Democrat Senator Ted Lieu, and many others:
On Twitter, Dr. Tara Sander Lee, Senior Fellow and Director of Life Sciences at Charlotte Lozier Institute, made this statement about Regeneron's humanized mice, carefully avoiding the issue of IVF-derived embyos mentioned in Regeneron's press release. (More about her claims below in the next article where I will show how she was wrong about this, too.)
Further debunking CLI's press statement that Regeneron did not use fetal tissue in their REGN-COV2 monoclonal antibody therapy, an October 7, 2020 MIT Review article confirmed that Regeneron does use the HEK293 stem cell line, but they do not consider it fetal tissue because "the 293T cells were acquired so long ago, and have lived so long in the laboratory, they are no longer thought of as involving abortion politics."
From Alexandra Bowie, the Regeneron spokesperson:
“It’s how you want to parse it,” says Alexandra Bowie, a Regeneron spokesperson. “But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue."
Dr. Tara Sander Lee made this half-hearted retraction, claiming that HEK293 was used only to test the antibodies.
She was instantly challenged by Professor Gerard Harbison, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Chemistry University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Harbison produced an August 20, 2020, scientific study done by Regeneron scientists and published in Science magazine, proving that HEK293 is used in the production of the antibody cocktail:
Prof. Harbison gave additional details in subsequent tweets:
Dr. Tara Sander Lee had no response, and as far as I know, never retracted her claims. She is a fervent advocate for ethically-sourced human embryonic stem cells to humanize mice. In 2018 she testified to Congress that there are abundant sources of fetal embryonic stem cells available from neonatal surgeries and miscarriages---which I believe is also an ethically murky proposition since the children in question are not capable of giving consent for their organs to be used in scientific experimentation.
What is most important to remember is that Regeneron acknowledges in their April 2020 press release that the stem cell lines they use are derived from adult human cells and from human embryonic stem cells from embryos "created solely through in vitro fertilization."
The stem cells most commonly used at Regeneron are mouse embryonic stem cells and human blood stem cells. Currently, there are limited research efforts employing human-induced pluripotent stem cell lines derived from adult human cells and human embryonic stem cells that are approved for research use by the National Institutes of Health and created solely through in vitro fertilization. Research using such stem cells allows Regeneron to model complex diseases, test new drug candidates and can help unlock new scientific insights that ultimately could lead to the discovery of new treatments for people with serious diseases
For more information on how "good quality spare embryos" discarded after IVF procedures are used in scientific research see this scientific paper.
In the next article I will address Dr. Lee's claims about Regeneron's humanized mice.
See this article for information on Regeneron's 2011 and 2017 studies using aborted baby organs:
See this article for information on the 2020 study at Yale University by Yale-affiliated researchers which used aborted baby organs to humanize mice:
See this article for information on the dubious ingredients in the Regeneron monoclonal antibody cocktail: