Metropolitan Hilarion, the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, said that declining to receive a Covid vaccine is “a sin for which [people] will have to atone throughout their lives,” “the sin is thinking of oneself but not of another person,” the Reuters news agency reported.

In its document on the morality of anti-Covid vaccines, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in contrast, said that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.”