Or have any treatment that uses or has used animals?
(For the pedants: I mean ‘may’ as in ‘according to their beliefs, are vegans ethically allowed such treatment’.)
I’m fairly certain the current H1N1 (swine) flu shot has egg products in it. Not sure about run-of-the-mill flu shots.
It really depends on how much the person fears the disease, really. There are plenty of vegan diabetics out there who willfully ignore the source of their insulin.
There’s not really a “Vegan book of rules”
1 die hard totalitarian vegan may say - no way, there’s egg in that, it’s been tested on animals…etc…
Others only limit what they eat by those rules.
My experience with Vegans is:
The vegan sitting next to me at work says he’d get the shot. That stuff doesn’t really matter - he just cares about what he eats.
Another Vegan at the other end of the building says totally no way, nothing that exploits animals at all. But I know her favorite drink is Jello Shots, so I don’t really think she knows all that much about her chosen diet.
Such as Mary Beth Sweetland, VP of PETA.
What pan1 said - some may find the use of animals merely for eating to be abhorrent, but accept medical usage. Others may prefer to use non-animal sources of medication wherever possible to minimize the potential for animal suffering, and I suspect there may be others who are dedicated enough to really try to avoid animal-derived products no matter what.
Both the H1N1 and seasonal influenza vaccines are grown in eggs, BTW.
As for insulin, there are now human-derived insulins that are grown in bacterial cultures, such as Humulin. I’m pretty sure there are no easily-available animal-produced insulins in the US any longer.
In all fairness, isn’t most insulin these days produced from genetically modified E. coli bacteria? I don’t think vegans concern themselves with anything outside of the animalia kingdom.
But I don’t know much about current synthetic insulin production methods beyond that. Are animal (by)products used in some other way that I don’t know about?
Indeed. The lady in question’s hypocrisy is that she happily uses medicine that will have been tested on animals and all our knowledge and understanding of comes from animal testing, yet at the same time preaches that animal testing should be banned.
If it wasn’t for animal testing she’d be dead.
There are non-egg based vaccinations - they are needed for the significant number of people that have egg allergies. Their availablity tends to lag the egg based ones. However there will need to be some approriate compound that the virus can be grown in, and the likelihood that that is animal product free is probably slim.
Flu virus vaccines may also be prepared with another animal product: sodium taurodeoxycholate. There is apparently a possibility of some trace being left, but its use is to disrupt the live virus, and it isn’t required in the final vaccine. So the ethics become a bit hair splitting.
The point of veganism is to limit the damage you do as much as is practical. Flu shots are a subject of active debate among vegans currently; many choose to forego them currently because the risk of death from flu is low. If that changed, behavior might change.
It’s worth noting that many vegans are against animal testing now, because much of it is unnecessary* and because it can be increasingly replaced by accurate computer simulations, without necessarily rejecting historical testing in the past. Again, what is practical. This position is sometimes willfully distorted by people trying to make vegans look foolish. Of course, foolish vegans exist, as do fools of every other sort.
- a certain amount of animal testing takes place solely to provide legal butt-covering against lawsuits, and a certain amount takes place merely to allow the term “tested” to be used in advertising.
It’s also worth noting that whenharmful medical testing has been performed on humans, people get pretty upset about it; so it’s clear that the golden rule is being applied sparingly by some people.
For die-hard vegans, there are egg-free vaccines out there. My sister’s boyfriend is severely allergic to eggs, but had to get a flu shot (his college is requiring them for people who live in the dorms, I believe), so he got a different shot. I mean, this is all being relayed to me via my sister, so take it with a grain of salt, but I do believe there are versions out there that don’t use eggs.
All flu shots are made using eggs.
FluMist, the nasal vaccine, is also made with eggs.
In short, there is NO flu vaccine that does not incorporate eggs. I have researched this thoroughly as I have asthma, which puts me into a high risk group, but I am also allergic to egg-based vaccines, which means I can not be safely vaccinated against the flu. Which sucks.
These days most, if not all, insulin is from genetically engineered bacteria that produce human insulin. Unless you regard bacteria as animals, “Humalin” is vegan.
If he’s allergic to eggs he didn’t get a flu shot. If someone was insisting that a person allergic to eggs has to have a flu shot they should be sued. If someone gives a flu shot to someone known to be allergic to eggs they should be brought up on some sort of assault or malpractice charges because shooting an allergen directly into someone’s body can potentially kill them.
I find it inconceivable there is no exemption for medical reasons. I suspect the story you heard was distorted in the telling.
I certainly hope not! Think of it as evoution in action.
What type of computer simulations are adequate for testing drugs? I have a hard time believing that something as complicated as the human body can be accurately simulated when we can’t accurately model a single protein.
More importantly, why aren’t we testing on humans first?
This is a bit of a hijack since it has nothing to do with eggs or flu, but weren’t bacteria considered part of the plant kingom until aorund the mid-80s? ISTR high school biology teaching us that there were only 3 kingdoms: plants, animals and funguseses.
“Computer modeling” of new drugs on the scope being suggested is wishful thinking. I say this as a vegetarian (not vegan, and partially a veg for moral/ethical reasons) who works in the field of medical research.
groman - We tend to test on healthy humans or ‘about to die of terribly dreadful incurable disease’ humans second, then on humans with the problem in question (once we’ve established on the previous humans that it may actually help with the problem and isn’t too harmful) as the third step. Animal testing may be useful, especially at predicting rare side effects, and the animals don’t tend to sue the companies’ rears off over side effects. If you went ahead and tested on humans first I can see a big likelihood of lawsuits over failure to do any testing before trying it on humans.
Re: Sailboat’s computer modeling. The fields of computational toxicology and pharmacy are right now in their infancy. The field has only been around for about 10 years or so, so this is all very new and exciting. Perhaps one day (read, at least a couple decades from now), much of the regulatory decisions will be made primarily using computational models and simulations (based upon data from animal tests), but right now the technology only allows a very crude understanding of pharmacological effects.
There’s no central authority who gets to decide what all vegans can and can’t have, and in what circumstances. Each individual vegan gets to make those decisions for him or herself. I suspect the answer is “some would, some wouldn’t”.
Jewish and Muslim dietary laws have exceptions for someone at risk of dying. You can and should eat pork if the alternative is starving to death, and at least Jews are allowed to take medicines made from non-kosher ingredients if there’s a risk of dying without it (I don’t know about Muslims). It wouldn’t be too strange if a vegan decided to make the same kind of exception. I wouldn’t consider that hypocritical- more like common sense.
All virus base vaccines must be made with living animal tissue. Viruses cannot reproduce on their own. They need living cells to help reproduce their DNA. Bacteria based vaccines don’t have to be made with animal tissue since they’ll reproduce on their own. All they need is a food supply which may or may not be strictly vegetarian.
Eggs are used because they are cheap, their cells divide and grow very fast, and they don’t need a lot of care.
If you have an egg allergy, you’re told not to get a flu shot.