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?
