Are vaccine side effects a consequence of misinformation and "anti-vaxxers"?

An assessment of the currently circulation review targeting "anti-vaxxers" for spreading misinformation and stoking fear.

Edit 11/28/2022: Apparently one of the sentences below was a fragment. I added additional words to flesh out the sentence structure (the included fragment is italicized below).

By now many of you have likely seen this circulating review article¹, with a somewhat incoherent title with a rather bold statement:

I first heard of this study when Aydin Paladin appeared on Tim Pool’s podcast and mentioned this article (timestamped to relevant point below):

As Aydin mentions, it’s a rather generous term to use “study” in reference to this article, and rather serves more as a point of contention for his [Palmer’s] position.

The article itself is not long, but what it states is rather frustrating for several reasons.

Most notably, the hubris and assuredness to which Palmer states his position is extremely pervasive in his piece, which can be noted in the Abstract alone (emphasis mine):

Fear mongering and misinformation being peddled by people with no scientific training to terrorise people into staying unvaccinated is not just causing people to remain susceptible to viral outbreaks, but could also be causing more side effects seen in the vaccination process. This brief review will offer data that may demonstrate that misinformation perpetuated by the anti-vaccination movement may be causing more deaths and side effects from any vaccine.

A mini review of published literature has been conducted and found that mental stress clearly causes vasoconstriction and arterial constriction of the blood vessels. Therefore, if subjects are panicked, concerned, stressed or scared of the vaccination, their arteries will constrict and become smaller in and around the time of receiving the vaccine. This biological mechanism (the constriction of veins, arteries and vessels under mental stress) is the most likely cause for where there has been blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, dizziness, fainting, blurred vision, loss of smell and taste that may have been experienced shortly after vaccine administration. The extreme mental stress of the patient could most likely be attributed to the fear mongering and scare tactics used by various anti-vaccination groups.

I personally find it strange that such a short article would find a need to contain an Abstract as well as a Conclusion.

Nonetheless, the emphasized points above are seriously concerning. To suggest that those who have raised criticisms of the vaccines are terrorizing people is disingenuous and wholly divisive, as if to infer that those who are critical are targeting pharmacies and assaulting those who choose to get vaccinated.

It’s also a strange argument to suggest that those with no scientific training can’t provide their own perspective and thoughts.

Now, I do believe there is an issue of taking nuanced scientific ideas and over-generalizing them, but scientists themselves are not extracted from a small group of savants with the foresight of understanding science directly from birth. Everyone is at different stages of scientific conceptualization, and to argue that those who aren’t at the same level as elites can’t weigh in is, again, disingenuous and a rather elitist position to make.

Moving on, one of the biggest points of contentions is not that Palmer presents a hypothesis with a factor worth considering in the vaccine side effect argument, but rather that his argument is the definitive explanation for why these adverse events are happening.

The body of evidence provided by Palmer does nothing significant to tie together the relationship between stress, anxiety, and poor mental health to the various cardiovascular issues seen post-vaccination, but rather provides a tenuous association on the basis of the transitive property²:

• Post-vaccination adverse reactions include cardiovascular issues and strokes

• Mental stress can cause cardiovascular issues such as heart attacks and strokes

• ergo, mental stress post-vaccination is the likely cause for the adverse reactions, and is therefore the fault of those “anti-vaxxers”

Again, the body of Palmer’s article just makes associations between mental stress and increased risk of cardiovascular issues and strokes:

Even though the likelihood of mental stress causing strokes, heart attacks or blood clots may at first appear unlikely, a brief investigation of current medical literature clearly shows that simple tasks under clinical observing conditions such as public speaking can induce serious adverse outcomes [5]. Krantz et al. demonstrated that subjects with ischemia from mental stress experienced cardiac episodes more frequently than subjects without mental stress ischemia (8 of 34; 23%; p = 0.048).

It’s important to remember that such ideas are not far-fetched or exaggerated. I am of the idea that mental stress can play a critical role in one’s overall health including their risk of suffering cardiovascular issues, and as Palmer mentions the literature does indicate mental stress is a key player in poor health outcomes.

But for Palmer it is not within his position to include this as one of the many variables that are worth investigating, but that his assumption is the be-all; end-all of the discussion, as if to say that the adverse reactions seen are all caused predominately by mental stress.

It doesn’t help that Palmer’s discussion about vaccines is ambiguous, and actually obfuscates many of the facets of these novel vaccines:

Covid 19 vaccines use many of the same ingredients that have been safely used for many years, with the only major difference being the mRNA [1,2]. However, anti-vaccination sentiment and side effects are at an all time high, and this may point to a statistical significance.

What exactly are these “same ingredients” used in other vaccines? Is he referring to pseudouridine, or the novel use of the LNPs? The problem with this argument is that it presents information about these vaccines in such a simplistic form that it lacks any details to criticize. It’s almost a "lies by omission” tactic to make such rudimentary remarks.

The following paragraph itself is also worth highlighting for the fact that it also obfuscates some significant details:

Vaccines include antigens that produce an immune response which is adept at providing protection from disease [3]. However, reactogenicity from vaccines is very rare according to Herve et al. and mostly associated with mild irritations or other discomfort at the site of injection. Once vaccine antigens enter the body, they are distinguished as pathogens by the body’s immune system, the pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs), including Toll-like receptors (TLR) that are located on peripheral circulating immune cells [3,4].

Remember that, aside from Novavax’s vaccine and some of the inactivated/attenuated virus vaccines not found in the West, the most widely available vaccines are not antigen presenting vaccines, but rather are precursors that serve as the makeshift ingredients to which our cells are intended to utilize to construct the coded antigen.

This novel pathway is a serious point of contention, and the actual end product has rightfully been criticized for whether it presents the proper SARS-COV2 spike antigen, or if it just serves as a mere simulacrum for the real thing leading to different immunological responses than would be seen with a natural infection—all of the factors which can’t be boiled down by merely stating that the “vaccines include antigens”.

Also, note that the Herve, et al.³ piece cited comes from 2019 and would, by virtue of the publication date, not be relevant to the current novel vaccines discussed (at least as it relates to the mRNA and DNA-based vaccines). Note that the article makes a mere reference to lipids being adjuvants, and makes no mention in regards to the pseudouridine or vaccines that utilize genetic material rather than the antigen, so by all accounts the review article doesn’t address the various facets of these novel vaccines.

This article from Palmer doesn’t address concerns over the process by which the antigen is produced, and it certainly doesn’t do much to contextualize the fact that the spike itself is rather cytotoxic and comes with its own concerns, and instead glosses over the discussion around these vaccines with ambiguous, broad terms and statements.

And by all accounts, such statements made by Palmer and vaccine zealots obfuscate any implications that fear mongering over COVID itself may have caused. If we are to argue that vaccine criticisms may cause mental stress and contribute to the adverse reactions seen, then shouldn’t we also contend with the notion that messages inferring people will kill grandma or want others to die may also exacerbate the mental stress of many?

But that, of course, is not addressed in this review and instead provides one side of the argument:

The data presented herein, poses an interesting question, is the fear mongering around vaccines causing many of these perceived side effects by inducing unnecessary stress in vulnerable people? Is the movement and character of anti-vaccination information that may strike fear into the general population causing anxiety and vascular constriction resulting in pathologies such as dizziness, hypernea, fainting, blood clotting, stroke and heart attack? The science discussed here clearly establishes that anxiety and fear causes vasoconstriction disorders, and that a particular movement that is trying to save people with a profound lack of scientific and medical training (the anti-vaccination movement) from vaccine side effects may actually be the entity causing the majority of side effects.

So sure, blame one side when I can just as likely (and have previously discussed) implicate many of those whose reporting and discussion of COVID is based more in fear rather than science.

And this may be one of my biggest points of contentions with Palmer’s piece. Unlike others who have reported on this topic, I actually would have hoped that Palmer’s piece was presented as one of many factors worth considering among the multiple factors worth elucidating.

I, myself have commented that we can’t dismiss the role that an individual’s health plays in the presentation of vaccine adverse reactions, which ironically is something Palmer mentions in his Conclusion⁴. As I mentioned in my Catecholamine Series high stress can involve the sympathetic pathways and lead to high release of Catecholamines. Paired with the vaccines this combination can be quite detrimental and may contribute to an elevated risk of experiencing an adverse reaction.

I also noted that many teens are on ADHD medications, and that ADHD is considered to be a disease of Catecholamine dysfunction, AND that ADHD medications inhibit the reuptake of several Catecholamines and come with a black box label inferring increased risk of cardiovascular disease and sudden cardiac death in some individuals prescribed these medications.

This makes the situation with Palmer all the more frustrating, because I do believe many other factors should be examined if we are to consider why these adverse reactions are occurring.

All factors need to be addressed, and the fact that Palmer is so adamant in his assessment that his hypothesis is the likely hypothesis means that other people may tune out and not give parts of his idea some consideration.

We need to be careful in looking at things in either black or white, which is an issue that appears on both sides of the COVID discourse. We can’t dismiss other contributing factors if we are to find out the facts as to why these adverse reactions are occurring.

Remember, nuance and context is key in the discourse, and blanket statements such as Palmer does nothing to help get to the facts but rather creates more divisiveness and more narrow-minded thinking.

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1. Palmer R. D. (2022). Covid 19 vaccines and the misinterpretation of perceived side effects clarity on the safety of vaccines. BioMedicine, 12(3), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.37796/2211-8039.1371

2. The transitive property is a type of proof that is used quite often and has come up in various forms of media. It’s usually used as a way of associating different ideas or conditions together based on some similarity. The idea is rather simple:

If A = B, and B=C, then A=C

3. Hervé, C., Laupèze, B., Del Giudice, G., Didierlaurent, A. M., & Tavares Da Silva, F. (2019). The how's and what's of vaccine reactogenicity. NPJ vaccines, 4, 39. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41541-019-0132-6

4. Palmer notes the following, and I would actually go further and suggest that each person’s health history should have been assessed prior to being given a COVID vaccine:

All data or claims of adverse reactions from vaccines should first be weighed against a subject’s health history with a focus on their vascular and arterial systems, cardiologic fitness and propensity for mental stress induced ischemia.