Crucified by Science: How the Pope’s Jab Crusade Ended in a Hospital Bed

The Bishop of Rome, Earthly Father to 1.3 billion Catholics, the Vicar of Christ, was also one of the world’s top vaccine salesmen, crushing the next closest performer’s paltry record. And his death could not have been any more ironic, even if it had been prophetically predicted by Pfizer.

Which, in a sense, it was.

In 2021, as vaccine mandates began to bloom and spread like black mold spores, Pope Francis drove to his Popemobile to the jab clinic, getting his first shot right away on January 14, 2021. Remember that date.

 
Retired Pope Benedict would expire the following December 31, 2022, of, let me get this straight, “cardiogenic shock resulting from respiratory failure that evolved from a parenchymal insufficiency.” It was a masterpiece of medical obfuscation concealing the real reason for the old Pope’s death, if they even knew what it was.

But Benedict is a side story. He was, after all, 95 (albeit quite sprightly and cognitively sharp until the very end).

Benedict’s replacement, Pope Francis, took two more shots, surmounting the dreadful third benchmark in early 2022. Meanwhile, racing enthusiastically out of the gate in December 2020, even before his first one, the Pope began hawking jabs like there was no tomorrow. Most destructively, the Vatican’s doctrinal office gave Catholics formal permission, saying it was somehow “morally acceptable” for Catholics to get the coronavirus vaccine, even if the jabs had been developed using cell lines from aborted fetuses.

(Don’t think too hard about that logic, it will just give you a papal migraine.)

Using his mega-megaphone, the Pope guilt-tripped the faithful into taking the shots. He “launched a powerful appeal for people to get vaccinated, calling it an ‘act of love.’”

CLIP: Pope and his team urge Catholics to get mRNA jabs (3:00).

The Pope and his team of Cardinals and Archbishops explained to the faithful that the jabs were safe and effective, and getting them was a performative act of obligatory charity, a “simple and profound way to care for the most vulnerable.” He said that vaccines “bring hope to end the pandemic, but only if we collaborate with one another.” Francis urged Catholics to get the shots, calling it a “moral obligation.”

In other words, take one for the team.

Francis also labeled vaccine skepticism “suicidal” —a mortal sin in Catholic theology— and railed against sinful misinformation. “Frequently people let themselves be influenced by the ideology of the moment, often bolstered by baseless information or poorly documented facts,” the Pope said, calling for governments to adopt a “reality therapy” to stop “this distortion of human reason.”

It was a difficult setback for the resistance to the jabs.

During the pandemic, my dedicated team and I did everything we could think of to help unfortunate workers facing mandates. I personally published several guides on how best to write legally effective religious exemption requests and avoid an HR minefield. I lectured in countless Zoom sessions, for up to a hundred attendees per session, patiently answering questions from uncountable terrified folks facing “vaccinate or terminate” policies— including many Catholics.

Thanks to Pope Francis, Catholics faced a special problem. Instructions for submitting religious exemption requests often carved Catholics out, and specifically asked them to respond to the Pope’s “directives” to get jabbed, and to the Vatican’s official policy that believers’ abortion concerns were theologically unfounded. This problem could be navigated, but it was very tricky.

As a result, many Catholics’ valid religious exemptions were denied because they answered the papal question wrong.

While Pfizer had marketing budgets and government contracts, Francis enjoyed papal moral authority. He didn’t appeal to efficacy or studies. He decreed the jabs were “an act of love”—a spiritual duty. It was medical persuasion handed down from on high. By declaring vaccines a moral obligation, he cut the legs out from Catholics seeking religious exemptions. In other countries, his decrees were cited by governments and employers to justify coercion.

Francis didn’t just sell the shot. He sanctified it.

Francis became the religious face of vaccine campaigns— especially in vaccine-hesitant regions like Latin America, Africa, and the U.S. Bible Belt. No other pope was ever so aligned with a for-profit, secular medical policy. Unsurprisingly, Francis’s messaging wasn’t just quoted—it was canonized in media coverage. He was deified as a lone voice of reason in a sea of scientifically illiterate anti-vaxxers. The New York Times didn’t run any op-eds mocking Pfizer’s Pope— they handed him a megaphone.

But the problems people were experiencing with religious exemption questions were nothing compared to the Pope’s own rapidly expanding battle with personal health problems.

It started almost immediately. Pope Francis got his first shot on January 14, 2021, and the next week, canceled all his public appearances, citing horrible sciatic nerve pain. Autoimmune? Inflammatory? “Sciatica is very painful, very painful! I don’t wish it on anyone,” he said at the time.

Now that you can see where I’m going, we should pause to consider the media’s excuse. It’s already been deployed, since they saw this coming a long way off. When he was 21, Pope Francis had part of his lung removed, giving media cover to run headlines saying things like “The Pope’s Long History of Health Problems.” Except they overlook the fact that, apart from the youthful surgery, he had no respiratory problems until 2023.

You’re used to seeing the Pope in a wheelchair, but he walked fine before January 2021. Then it was, as they say, all downhill on the wheelchair ramp.

After his January bout with sciatica, the summer of 2021 brought Pope Francis colon surgery for a new diverticulitis diagnosis, which was confounded by surgical complications. He wound up staying 11 days in the hospital.

His relief from recovering from his colon surgery was short-lived. Six months later, in January 2022, he was back on the puny list, this time complaining of knee problems. By February, he was canceling events due to his knee pain, and needed help on stairs. By April, the Vatican reported the Pope’s doctors told him to stop trying to walk. The Pontiff would never walk normally again.

In May, he had his first knee procedure (some kind of injection) and appeared in his new papal wheelchair. Through the rest of 2022, in spite of sitting, the Pope would continue to cancel appearances on and off on account of disabling knee pain that resisted treatments and physical therapy.

Like some kind of dark clockwork, in January of 2023, right on schedule, the Pope announced his inflammatory diverticulitis had come back. A month later, Francis canceled several events citing a “strong cold,” and by March, the cold put him in the hospital for “some days.”

In June ’23, the Pope returned to the hospital, this time for more abdominal surgery, except for a different reason: “to repair an incisional hernia.” He recovered in the hospital for 8 days. The public explanations of the “incisional hernia” were all rather murky. A few months later in November ’23, the Pope canceled yet more events for a “mild flu” that required intravenous antibiotics.

2024 seemed to bring some relief, at least until December, when the Pope fell in his bedroom and got a large hematoma on his right cheek. Or at least, “a fall” was the offered explanation. That bloodspot was the beginning of the end.

Two weeks later, Francis had another bloodspot, this one on his arm, also blamed on a fall. Photos from his scheduled appearances show him wearing a white sling. In February, he spent over a week in the hospital for bronchitis. He was quickly re-hospitalized and spent half of March and most of April under hospital care for a respiratory tract infection that developed into double pneumonia.

Francis was finally discharged late Saturday to attend Easter events.

Then yesterday morning, as already noted, Pope Francis’ years of pain and suffering ended abruptly with a sudden and unexpected stroke and “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse,” whatever that is.

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the Pope died long and slow until he died all at once.

For jab watchers, it could not possibly be more obvious. The Pope’s health problems started within days of his first shot. And he went steadily, painfully downhill, as he continued with his second shot and then his special Fauci booster. And all his conditions reflect things we have learned to expect: systemic autoimmune, inflammatory, neurological, and cardiac conditions— followed by SADS.

It’s interesting to wonder about why Pope Francis stopped at three. Is it possible that, watching the Pope’s rapidly declining health, the Vatican’s doctors got buyer’s remorse? The magical health juice was just producing problems? Either way, just months after its vaccine passport policy started, in 2022, the Vatican quietly added a “natural immunity” exception to its vaccine mandate, which effectively ended it (though it wasn’t formally rescinded till last year).

In March 2022, the Vatican confirmed media’s inquiries that Pope Francis had his booster (his third shot) but —and this is the most curious fact of all— the Pope and the Vatican never got on the booster train, and never encouraged Catholics to “stay fully vaccinated.” The papal jab train halted without notice in early 2022.

No act of love accompanied the bivalent booster. No moral imperative engaged for shot numbers 4, 5, or 6. Not even, or in spite of, the science.

We’ll never know. We’ll never know because they will never admit the jabs were anything but “safe and effective,” as the Pope had so often urged his worldwide flock. But it seems clear Pope Francis’ early messaging was not just morally coercive, but strategically deceptive: He pressured the whole world to do something he himself later stopped doing, without any explanation or apology.

Here’s the dreadfully ironic nub: the world’s leading vaccine salesman has become its most prominent implicit accuser. He didn’t need to recant. He didn’t need to apologize. His body did the talking.

The man who urged billions to roll up their sleeves—who called it an act of love, a moral duty—spent his final years in painful, cascading decline, hobbled, sickened, and ultimately silenced. And though the Vatican refuses to release the records, the silence around his boosters says more than any press release could. He stopped after three. No more acts of love. Just four years of suffering, and then the final stillness.

He stands now, in death, as a kind of cautionary relic. Not just a pope, but a memento mori for the biomedical faithful: a shocking reminder that it’s one thing to bless the altar, and another to lie under it.

Among the many headlines about the Pope’s death today, you will find all the grotesque, mendacious cover stories about the Pope’s “long history of respiratory struggles.” That’s the narrative, but believe me, they know.

We all know. And we will never, ever forget.

The same people who once shouted “trust the science” are now whispering, “don’t ask too many questions.” But it is too late for that. The damage is done. The records are sealed. The man is gone. What remains is an awkward silence where there should have been confession. We pray the Pope’s sins—unforgivable in this world—will be forgiven in the next.

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