Media illiteracy: vaccine AE or nocebo?
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call a pandemic when a man takes the global media industrial complex for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.”
— Herman Melville, updated for 2022.
By now, everyone is probably familiar with the story that the media tried to push a couple of weeks ago. According to the brain trust of the global media, a study out of JAMA showed that up to 76% of vaccine side effects were caused by something they dub “the nocebo effect”. Basically, a nocebo, and I feel like an idiot for even using the term, is the occurrence of a side effect in the placebo arm. Presumably, they mean both side effects that would have occurred anyways and those that are in people’s minds.
The study itself reads like it is ghostwritten by a pharmaceutical company. There are two ways to read the results — and only one of them is honest. Hint: The media did not report on the results honestly.
For starters, when we speak about adverse events following vaccination, we (the skeptics) mean serious adverse events. Serious adverse events were completely omitted from the study. This is pretty important considering the newswires only picked this story up in order to quell concerns about the vaccine being dangerous. But more importantly, the click-bait headlines show that the media completely lack even basic analytical skills.
The study is a meta-analysis that looks at twelve articles and thirteen adverse events including pain, swelling, redness, tenderness, fever, chills, fatigue, malaise, joint pain, muscle pain, and headache. Notice, many of these symptoms are extremely common, and almost as many are subjective. Joint pain, for example, is not comparable to more serious adverse events, like myocarditis, which can be observed and measured. So these results cannot be extended to serious adverse events, and that is probably the best the vaccine manufacturers could hope so because despite what the media reported, the results of this study look BAD for the vaccines. And, more specifically, for the mRNA vaccines.
First of all, every single type of adverse event in the mRNA vaccines was statistically significant1, and the adverse events were more common after the second. Maybe the authors thought that is an obvious conclusion, but it seems ridiculous to come to the conclusion that “public vaccination programs should consider these high nocebo responses” when twice as many adverse events occurred in the vaccine recipients in the second dose. That is not a high “nocebo” response. That is a really low response and a huge amount of adverse events from the vaccines.
Where did the 76% number come from? That was for systemic events from the first dose and only the first dose. The omitted number is the 51.8% of systemic events in the second dose. But the real question, and where I see the dishonesty, is why would anyone report it that way when all adverse events are statistically significant? That is minimizing the fact that all these events are frequent occurrences after the vaccine.
I propose an alternative title for the media in future cases like this: “Your headache from the first dose of the vaccine may not be an adverse event, but your hellish chills after the second dose most certainly are”.
Diarrhea and nausea are statistically significant for the second dose only.
I feel a little like this confuses the article. They are claiming that the nocebo effect is similar to the placebo effect, but for the comparator arm. Basically, people are expecting adverse effects to happen, so they get a headache or whatever after they get the vaccine.
Which of course is silly, because if that were the case, both the placebo and vaccine arms would have the same rate of events. There is literally no reason why we would see this so-called nocebo effect occur at a higher rate than the placebo effect.
What exactly does the "76%" number mean anyway? Is it saying that the placebo "caused" 76% as many "adverse reactions" as the real thing, therefore maybe that many of the jab reactions are "in their head"? If that's what they're saying, then a more honest way of putting it would be that "there is a ~33% greater chance of minor adverse events in the jab compared to the placebo".