Vaccine side effect warnings are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As you know, The Back Page has for some time now been the #1 source of reliable covid vaccine information in Australia. Probably the world.
Just last week we informed you of the vaccine’s potentially positive side-effect, and the role it could play in your daily beauty regimen. You won’t see that on the ABC.
Continuing our stellar coverage of the greatest medical emergency of our lifetime, a new report from researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) claims that the placebo effect accounts for more than two-thirds of covid-19 vaccine adverse events.
In a meta-analysis of randomised, placebo-controlled covid-19 vaccine trials, the researchers compared the rates of adverse events reported by participants who received the vaccines to those reported by people who received a placebo injection containing no vaccine. While many more trial participants who received the vaccine reported an adverse effect, nearly a third of participants who received the placebo also reported at least one adverse event, with headache and fatigue being the most common.
This inversion of the placebo effect – where a placebo generates negative side-effects rather than positive ones – is known as the “nocebo effect”. As in, “No! See, bones aren’t falling out of your skin, you’re having a psychosomatic reaction to sugar syrup”.
“Nonspecific symptoms like headache and fatigue – which we have shown to be particularly nocebo-sensitive – are listed among the most common adverse reactions following covid-19 vaccination in many information leaflets,” said senior author Ted J. Kaptchuk. “Evidence suggests that this sort of information may cause people to misattribute common daily background sensations as arising from the vaccine or cause anxiety and worry that make people hyper alert to bodily feelings about adverse events.”
Which raises the question: how many negative reactions to the covid vaccine can be attributed to the Placebo effect?
In the immortal words of Placebo (the band) …
If you see something that gives you a headache, send a fatigued email to felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au
