Rehabilitating the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, experts told me, will require honest acknowledgments of its shortcomings, and validating, not combatting, people’s concerns. The rare blood clots that have been tied to the vaccine are serious, they said, but extraordinarily uncommon—a risk that’s far outweighed by the benefits of immunity. The pause clearly did shake things up. Willie Bodrick II, a senior pastor of Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, who’s heavily engaged in vaccine outreach to the city’s Black community, told me that, even before the pause, he had been fielding questions about the J&J shot for weeks. Some people who were unwilling to take a second dose, whether because of work constraints or wariness of side effects, saw the single injection as an ideal option; others “were really worried they would be receiving a subpar vaccine,” he said. Just days before the J&J halt, Bodrick felt he’d made progress. But news of the rare blood clots “resurfaced a hurdle I thought we were doing a good job moving beyond,” he said. Van Yu, a physician in New York City working to bring J&J vaccines to people experiencing homelessness, told me that, before the pause, many of his patients explicitly requested “the single-shot thing.” Now that J&J is available again, he and his colleagues have noticed that some people are citing the halt as a reason to turn it down. The risk of clots has persuaded a few people to forgo vaccination entirely. Earl Potts, a 60-year-old IT-security specialist in Maryland, told me that he’s been skeptical of receiving any vaccines for decades. Although constant coaxing from family initially nudged him and his wife, Lori Renee Potts, toward getting J&J “because it was just one shot,” the pause reignited their fear that the vaccine-making process had been rushed. “I need more data; I need more time,” he said.