As a child, I always had trouble cleaning my room. What should have been a 10-minute exercise turned into an all-day project, because of course the most important part of cleaning my room was reorganizing the bookshelves, and a book, once in my hand, demanded to be read.
Tonight, trying to get my office in order, and with no time to spare for distractions, I came upon the paperwork I received along with my seasonal flu shot.
Plus ça change: Twenty minutes later, I finally tossed the papers in the trash, and will be back to work as soon as I've posted this—meaning what should have taken half a second to deal with will have eaten up about 40 minutes. I was inspired to try to find out where the vaccine had been manufactured, hoping it was in some country whose quality control I thought I could trust, i.e. not China. The information is surprisingly hard to discover. Although the papers were covered with remarkably fine print, I could see no point of origin. "Manufactured by..." does not necessarily indicate where. Once I found out the names of the company and of the vaccine, however, I could do an Internet search.
Not that that helped, except negatively: there was at least no evidence that the manufacturing facilities were in China. I must also say that the name of the company itself was reassuring: Novartis. For no good reason, I must admit—but anything from Basel must be reliable, right?That in no way means it was manufactured in Basel... Go to www.novartis.com and under About Novartis pick Locations...
Too true. I did notice that they have branches in China, including three if I pick "vaccines & diagnostics." My hope was (1) that whatever Novartis is doing in China it's not manufacturing vaccines, at least (selfishly) not the vaccines sent here, and more importantly (2) that as a Swiss company, Novartis would be exercising stringent quality control, wherever their vaccines are manufactured.
It may be a foolish hope, but since I've already received the vaccine, there's not much I can do anyway. I would have trusted Colgate, also, to have good quality control, yet they let the Chinese put propylene glycol in their toothpaste.
I am sure this happens to you too....
When I am trying to organize my genealogy notes, I often come across something that I am just going to take a quick peek at on Ancestry....several hours later....
It sure does....
I wouldn't talk to those who work for Novartis if you want comfort. Just like the employees of fast food joints that never again east fast food, the insiders have reason enough to be wary of drugs. (Now I hope Novartis doesn't sue for bad advertising nor fire my friends. Simply put, when you are doing a risk-benefit analysis you must look very closely at the risks, and that would make anyone wary.)
