It’s a lesson that may be useful to medical professionals, who can reassure patients that most side effects are normal and predictable-and may not even be caused by the vaccine. “We’ve seen this in the military, when young recruits, who think they can tolerate anything, faint when they get the injections, because their body overreacts,” says Jacobson. Recent studies show some side effects, even ones from the COVID-19 vaccines, aren’t due to the injections at all, but to our own fears. The take-home message here, says Jacobson: “It’s easy to confuse an allergic reaction with nervousness or emotions or even stomach upsets from anxiety.” Half of these people had received the placebo and yet they complained of the worst headaches, or worst fever, of their lives. “About five percent said they got sicker than they ever had been in their entire life,” says Jacobson. When the researchers unblinded the study to see who received the vaccine versus the placebo, the side effects were split equally between the two groups, says Robert Jacobson, medical director for the population health science program at the Mayo Clinic. The study involved more than 300 veterans over the age of 65 who were given either a flu shot followed two weeks later by a placebo injection of salt water, or a placebo shot followed two weeks later by the real vaccine. To address this issue, in 1991, a group of scientists in Minnesota-at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Mayo Clinic-devised an experiment to see just how frequent these unpleasant reactions were. Side effects can be a powerful deterrent stopping people from getting vaccinated.
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