Bolt from the blue: mid-week links
Vaccine side effects and the strange tricks played by our brains
In this week’s article, I touched briefly on the fascinating world of cognitive biases – the way that our brains take shortcuts and sometimes lead us astray. The article that I linked to, from The Atlantic, is a great introduction to the topic if you’d like to understand more. The specific article on confirmation bias – the tendency to notice information which supports existing beliefs while filtering out information that contradicts them – gives a good overview of that important bias in particular.
While the placebo effect will be familiar to many of you, the nocebo effect is less commonly discussed or understood. This article gives a good overview. Whether it will help you avoid experiencing nocebo effects is debatable, because we know that placebos have some effect even when people know that they are taking a placebo. But the information about nocebo effects is good to keep in mind when reading the links in the following paragraph.
As well as trials before a vaccine is approved, there is continued reporting of possible side-effects once the vaccine is in use. Although this type of data is less reliable than trial data, because of nocebo effects, it is still useful to understand. The article I’ve linked here is a BBC summary of what the UK has found with the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine. And here’s an anecdotal summary of what some people experience. It explains why you are more likely to get side effects from the second vaccine dose, and puts the vaccine side effects into context with what Covid-19 can do.
The Turnstone comes out twice a week - a full article on Sunday and some interesting links related to each week’s article on Wednesday (or Thursday, this week). If you have any suggestions for topics or articles which I should highlight, please let me know.
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