VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) – Pope Francis has picked a non-Catholic scientist who helped create the abortion-tainted COVID-19 vaccine to serve as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Mariana Mazzucato
The Holy See Press Office announced Saturday that the Holy Father had appointed Hungarian-born Katalin Karikó, lecturer at the University of Szeged, whose estimated net worth is $5 million, to the Vatican’s prestigious pro-life body.
Karikó is senior vice president and head of RNA-based protein replacement therapies at BioNTech, the company that co-developed the COVID-19 vaccine with Pfizer — a product that the Holy See forced upon its clergy and employees during the coronavirus pandemic.
BioNTech is facing a barrage of compensation claims in Germany brought by two law firms, Rogert & Ulbrich and Cäsar-Preller, who allege their clients suffered lasting health damage from the company’s coronavirus vaccine.
On Wednesday, a class action securities lawsuit was filed against BioNTech that seeks to recover losses of shareholders who were adversely affected by alleged securities fraud between March 30, 2022, and Oct. 13, 2023.
The complaint, filed by New York-based law firm Levi & Korsinsky, alleges that BioNTech made false statements by overstating demand for the commercial prospects of its COVID-19 vaccine and accumulated excess inventory of raw materials for the jab.
Accordingly, BioNTech was at an increased risk of recording significant inventory write-offs and other charges related to the vaccine, and as a result, the company’s “public statements were materially false and/or misleading at all relevant times.”
The 68-year-old Karikó won the Nobel prize in medicine with Drew Weissman, an American immunologist, who collaborated with the biochemist in creating the experimental injection, which yielded sales worth $117 billion for pharma giants BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna.
According to the Financial Times, when Karikó emigrated to the United States in 1985, she successfully evaded currency export restrictions by sewing into a teddy bear 900 British pounds, money that was obtained on the black market with funds from selling her car.
The scientist left Hungary with her engineer husband, Béla Francia, and their two-year-old daughter, Susan, after the laboratory lost its funding.
Thanking the pontiff in a post on X, Karikó said she was “deeply honored” that Pope Francis had appointed her as a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“Last year, I gave a lecture in the Vatican on emerging biotechnologies. It was exciting to meet Pope Frances on [sic] a private audience with my family, he blessed my grandchildren,” she noted.
Sheila Tlou (left) with Anthony Fauci and Hillary Clinton
Critics have expressed concern that Francis’ appointments to the Academy for Life have not been in full agreement with the mission of the pontifical pro-life body that was established through a motu proprio by Pope John Paul II in February 1994.
In Nov. 2022, Francis appointed pro-abortion atheist economist Mariana Mazzucato as a full member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Francis also appointed pro-abortion activists — bioethicist Dr. Roberto Dell’Oro and former Botswanan Health Minister Sheila Dinotshe Tlou to the academy.
The pope told reporters that he was triggering a “revolution” by appointing women to top positions in the Vatican “because women know how to find the right way; they know how to move forward.”
“And now I have put Mariana Mazzucato in the Pontifical Academy for Life. She is a great economist from the United States. I put her there to give a little more humanity to it,” Francis stressed.
Mazzucato, a member of the globalist World Economic Forum, is also a climate alarmist who has been threatening Orwellian “climate lockdowns” and calling for a “climate revolution” since the COVID-19 crisis, Church Militant reported.
On Monday, Mazzucato told a reporter at a Vatican press conference that she found it “very sad that we go backwards instead of forwards” when asked if her membership of the academy was in consonance with her atheist and pro-abortion positions.
“I’m an academic, economist, never written an op-ed, blog, journal article or a book that has had even the word abortion or religion in it,” Mazzucato emphasized. “I once retweeted a comic who I thought did a very good job in just raising hypocrisy around some of these issues.”
Francis’ appointment of Karikó has rekindled questions around the pontiff’s role in promoting the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine which used the HEK-293 (human embryo kidney) cell line from a 1972 abortion in confirmatory testing.
In Jan. 2022, Pope Francis held secret talks with Pfizer plutocrat and veterinary doctor Albert Bourla at the Vatican during the height of the coronavirus crisis, Church Militant reported.
The undisclosed meetings were not included in the daily bulletin published by the Holy See Press Office (which notifies Vatican journalists of the pope’s public and private audiences) or in any Vatican media.
Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion in 2009 for what was then the largest health care fraud settlement ever. The company spent over $21.8 million in 2019-2020 and $6.7 million from January to August 2021 on lobbying the government, making it the biggest spender of any individual drug company during the COVID-19 crisis.
Pfizer was the biggest corporate spender from 1999-2018, spending $219 million on lobbying (93% of the industry total) and $23 million on campaign contributions (around 10% of the industry’s total giving to politicians), Church Militant earlier reported.
During the pandemic, the German government subsidized BioNTech to the tune of 375 million euros ($445 million). The European Investment Bank also granted the Mainz-based pharma company a 100-million-euro loan.
