Johnson & Johnson, an On-Again Off-Again Relationship
On April 13th, the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine (notorious for being the only vaccine requiring a single dose) was recommended to stop administration by the FDA after rare blood clots were linked to six out of 6.8 million patients.
Now, was this the right thing to do in the long run? Who knows? Is this going to add to the already huge problem of vaccine hesitancy in America? Probably.
If you didn’t know, Elon put on a weeklong J&J vaccine clinic right before the news of blood clots broke. After acquiring about 1,800 doses of the vaccine, and North Carolina accelerated the vaccine eligibility for students, this clinic was the greatest thing to happen on campus since Covid first started.
Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine was paused in the U.S. after it was linked to cases of rare blood clotting in women aged 18 to 48. Photo from Pixabay.com.
For students who participated in the clinic, their fear of bad symptoms or suddenly developing blood clots is warranted, especially with the overwhelming amount of media coverage on this.
While the CDC has since recommended that the pause on J&J doses be lifted, young women have been singled out as being at higher risk (though still low odds) should they choose this vaccine.
For Laney Daniels, a fellow Edge Magazine photographer, her fear of a bad reaction to the J&J vaccine came to fruition almost immediately after the shot in the arm.
“It took about 45 minutes for me to start feeling it [side effects],” she says. “I was standing up and I was like, ‘I don’t feel so good.’”
And suddenly, Daniels passed out, beginning her first of many days following the vaccine throwing up on and off.
She called her mom, as one would in this situation, and her mom believed she could have contracted a stomach bug as well, not knowing a symptom of the vaccine is nausea and vomiting.
Daniels spent the next few days throwing up every morning, “Which was super inconvenient,” she says.
She was told to report her symptoms to hotlines since they were so extreme, and she filled out a form each day on a site called “V-Safe” an “after vaccination health checker” created and run by the CDC.
Daniels says she was always planning on getting a Covid vaccine no matter what, even if the risk of symptoms made her nervous and she gets antsy around shots.
“I can feel sick after shots, just like the flu shot,” she says. “But when I found out that there’s all this stuff going on [with the blood clots] and they started canceling it I was like ‘Oh, that’s not really reputable.’”
Johnson & Johnson has struggled to maintain their status of a “reputable company” beginning with the infamous Tylenol murders in 1982 to the baby powder scandal in 2018, when The New York Times proved J&J had been covering up the presence of asbestos in its baby powder products.
Since then, there’s been a lot of distrust in the company (rightfully so), and when they released a Covid vaccine, many refused to get it based on the company’s bad reputation alone.
“I’m glad I got it done,” Daniels says, in response to whether she regrets taking the J&J vaccine. “I was between getting it or waiting a little bit longer in the first place.”
Once Daniels could say she was totally vaccinated—with that vaccine card proof in her wallet—life started feeling more comfortable again, and she was relieved from it.
“At the end of the day, since I’m past all the symptoms, I’m glad,” Daniels says. “But I am lucky I was totally fine from it.”