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Comment by cyberlab | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great that we have a choice. Johnson&Johnson have a little history behind them that everyone should be made aware of though: https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/

> In 1994, Johnson & Johnson introduced baby powder made of crushed talc. The mineral can be found with asbestos in the earth, raising concern talc products are contaminated with toxic asbestos. In recent years, J&J has lost multimillion dollar lawsuits related to ovarian cancer caused by baby powder.

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J&J hasn't been approved yet in the UK. The alternatives would be Moderna + Pfizer. Also, I doubt you'll get a choice of alternative, just whatever one is available in your local area at the time.

Also J&J was not tested on 35M people yet. It could turn out to have other problems. There was already a factory mix up incident in Baltimore which led to the loss of 15M J&J doses and possibly another 62M doses contaminated. That doesn't inspire much confidence, does it?

https://www.businessinsider.com/millions-johnson-and-johnson...

Actually, it does - it means there's scrutiny and high quality standards to the point that 15M J&J vaccines were thrown away, and that 62M doses are being checked if they're up to standards.

It means that the watch dogs are watching.

With that said we don't know if other problems will be discovered in the long run, but that's what regulators are there for. In the case of AZ vaccine, they're clearly working as well.

People died in the case of the AZ vaccine. It feels like spin to call that “working.”

Well when you have something happening in a large pool of people (hundreds of thousands/millions) it's not likely that a trial would catch that, so the next protocol after trials is to follow through on any report of a potential side effect.

So yeah, it's working even if people have died with a direct cause of a vaccine.

As the article states the factory is run by Emergent Biosciences and they were producing both J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines and somehow cross contaminated the vaccines. No vaccines from that factory had been approved for distribution yet. So maybe there is an issue of confidence regarding Emergent, but not on the two vaccines themselves.

Also we've already heard since then that the US has put J&J in charge of the factory to only produce their vaccine.

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