Honestly, I don’t know the reach or influence of this bishop or his message, though it was certainly amplified by the media attention.
I feel like everyone is pretending he said something other than what he said. So I’ll quote it again just as a reminder:
[W]e advise that if the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is available, Catholics should choose to receive either of those vaccines rather than to receive the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of its extensive use of abortion-derived cell lines.
If someone was on the fence about chipping and read that message and their take away was “the bishop doesn’t want me to get vaccinated” I don’t know what to say.
I've never pretended the bishop said anything but that. And I'd be more concerned about people who weren't on the fence who now are because of an issue that really only "catholic wonks" were worried about two days ago. it's all very "not involved in human trafficking" t-shirt-esque. "It's OK to use the aborted fetus vaccine if the one with cloned baby parts isn't available" raises a lot of questions answered in the statement.
Like I said, I don’t expect non Catholics to care about the medical ethics questions/debate among some Catholics. But as someone who is at least a little in tune with the Catholic politics, i can say that at least some people were reticent about vaccines because of the medical ethics associated with the fetal tissue. Hence, some guidance on the issue from Church officials is predictable, and helpful to those people who do care. If you think the Church offering any guidance other than unconditional wholesale endorsement of every vaccine regardless of ethical origin, sorry.
To your original point, if you assume people are going to read the bishop’s statement and think they better not get vaccinated, I don’t have a good response. I think that response would be unlikely and irrational, but if you take a more pessimistic view, we just disagree.
