You can’t blame it ALL on the vaccine
All medicines — in fact, all medical procedures — have side effects of one sort or another. some are rare, while some are common. And to complicate matters, we know that some of the side effects reported are nothing to do with the drug at all. it’s pure coincidence they occurred at the same time someone started taking the medication or had that procedure.
However, people will swear blind that they must be related, even when you assure them that there is no possible way it could have been caused by the medication they took.
i have been fascinated by some of the side effects people have reported with the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid vaccine.
Flatulence, excessive blinking, insect bites and even, bizarrely, losing teeth have all been cited by people as reactions to the jab in a 65-page list of alleged reactions compiled by the UK’s drug regulator.
The medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (mHRA) has, of course, dismissed these, but it goes to show how our brains like to make associations and draw conclusions about causation.
detecting patterns and drawing conclusions from these apparent patterns is an important part of how we humans learn and how we make decisions.
SOme people have even argued that the brain is, in fact, little more than a highly evolved pattern-recognition machine. Often the patterns our brains see are real, but sometimes they are just chance. The problem is that our brain isn’t good at differentiating between these.
Psychologists have called this ‘patternicity’ — finding patterns and meaning in meaningless noise. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Our ancestors had to quickly make links and associations between cause and effect as a matter of survival. sometimes it would be wrong, but sometimes it would be correct.
We are programmed to find patterns — even when there aren’t any — as this helps provide at least some semblance of order on an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable world.
Our brains are hardwired to look for recognisable images among random shapes. This explains why someone can see the face of elvis on a piece of burnt toast, for example, or a face in clouds.
The same is true for events: our brains desperately try to find a meaning among random occurrences even though they may be down to chance.
But, as with the case of worry about vaccines, this can sometimes lead us to illogical or unhelpful conclusions.
it reminds me of when i was a medical student and i did a GP attachment with an elderly doctor, who was about to retire.
Working with this GP was fascinating because he had the kind of experience and knowledge that cannot be learnt in a lecture or from a textbook. He told me of how, a few years previously, he had been holding a vaccination clinic. Although the link between the mmR vaccine and autism has since been categorically disproved, the doctor who undertook the research struck off the medical register and the original piece of research retracted from the journal in which it was published , the idea that this vaccine can be dangerous still persisted in some people’s minds. even today, many parents worry that, despite the evidence of the immense benefit that vaccination brings, it is still risky. The GP had done his best to reassure his patients and, slowly, more and more parents were coming to have their children immunised. One mother asked questions about the safety of vaccination and, after the GP had allayed her fears, she eventually agreed for her son to receive the jab. The child was crying so the doctor put the child on his knee. He was about to administer the vaccine when, suddenly, the child had a seizure. it didn’t last long, but the child didn’t receive the vaccine and was sent to the local hospital.
As the GP explained to me, if he had vaccinated the child a minute earlier, the child would have had the seizure after the vaccine and the mother would — understandably — have been convinced for ever more that the vaccine had caused the seizure.
TLAST week, the House of Lords debated whether school uniform is ‘repressive’ and should be abolished. Rubbish. From a psychological perspective, school uniform performs a vital function, ensuring all kids — rich or poor — feel part of the same group. It brings them together and is a great leveller.
HAT mother would then also have told every other parent about her experience and it would have caused great worry and upset.
even if he had tried to explain that there was no evidence that the jab caused seizures, and it was just a coincidence, no one would have believed him.
in fact, he said he, too, would probably have thought the vaccine had caused the seizure.
Just a few seconds difference, he and a whole community would have falsely abandoned science for what they thought they had seen with their own eyes.
it was an invaluable lesson in making sure that we all trust in the science, not simply what we think is true.