Authors: Dr Gary Sidley (Retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist) & Dr Jonathan Engler (A medically and legally qualified healthcare entrepreneur)

(This article was initially published – in three parts – by ‘The Conservative Woman’)

What was the major cause of the harms reported during the covid event? Disparity of opinion persists about the relative contributions of various factors to the documented morbidity for the period 2020 to 2022. Proponents of the official government narrative continue to assert that a novel virus was predominantly responsible. Meanwhile, many critics of the ‘pandemic’ story highlight the pervasive consequences of the covid restrictions and responses (such as lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and business closures). Other commentators offer evidence of data manipulation and fabrication.

Yet there is another potential contender for chief culprit that is rarely considered: the nocebo effect.

The nocebo effect can be defined as a self-fulfilling prophecy where the expectation of a negative outcome has a direct detrimental impact on health and wellbeing. A comparable process is operative in the robust and more widely recognised phenomena of ‘placebo’ effects, where a patient’s positive expectation of an intervention results in a better outcome despite the fact that the ‘treatment’ consists of an inert substance (such as a sugar pill); nocebo is the unwelcome flipside of this mechanism, where anticipation of a bad outcome makes such a consequence more likely.

Here we will propose that the public health directives witnessed during the covid event will – by encouraging unhelpful behavioural and psychological strategies – have amplified nocebo effects to such a degree as to render them a major contributor to the overall harms reported[i].

The harms of negative expectation

In contrast to placebo, nocebo effects have, until recent years, been a neglected area of research study. There is now, however, a growing body of empirical evidence consistent with the premise that the anticipation of an adverse outcome in the aftermath of an event – such as an accident, medical intervention, or public health alert – can increase the likelihood that the adverse outcome will occur. To illustrate the existence of this self-fulfilling prophecy, some documented examples of how negative expectations can be deleterious to our health are given below, broadly structured under four headings:

1.     SUBJECTIVE ACCOUNTS OF DISCOMFORT

As one might expect, self-reports of distress and incapacity comprise the largest category of recognised nocebo effects. These include:

a)     Headaches

–        Seventy-one percent of a group of college students reported headaches after being misled into believing that electrical impulses – that could potentially cause headaches – were passing through their heads.

b)     Labour pain

–        Women about to give birth who had been informed that the injection of local anaesthetic would ‘sting’ subsequently reported more pain during childbearing than those who were told that the injection would ‘numb the area’.

c)     Heat pain

–        Being informed that a painkilling opioid drug would make heat pain worse rendered a powerful analgesic ineffective.

d)     Nausea

–        Thirty-five percent of subjects in the placebo arm of a chemotherapy trial reported drug-related nausea.  

e)     Dizziness & breathing difficulties

–        A fictional portrayal of illness on a Portuguese soap opera triggered hundreds of teenagers to be struck down with a copycat ‘illness’, with mass reporting of dizziness and breathing difficulties.

f)     Insomnia & fatigue

–        In a cancer drug treatment trial, 79% of participants in the placebo arm reported  sleep disturbance, and 72% fatigue, as side effects.

g)     Sore throat & stuffy nose

–        A careless comment by a nurse led a participant in a research study to believe that he had been inoculated with mucous secretions from a person with a cold; later the same day he reported a range of prominent cold symptoms, including sore throat and stuffiness. (When informed the next day that he had only received a sterile solution, his severe symptoms disappeared within the hour).

2.     SYMPTOMS VISIBLE TO OTHERS

In addition to the many subjective reports of nocebo effects, there is also documented evidence of negative expectations evoking symptoms that are clearly visible to others. Examples include:

a)     Whooping cough

–        Misled by the false positives of mass testing, 142 people at a New Hampshire hospital were informed that they had Whooping Cough. Many healthcare staff were stricken with ‘severe, intractable coughing’, and almost 1500 resorted to antibiotics. It was subsequently proven that there was not a single case of true Whooping Cough (the causative bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, was never detected); the victims were afflicted with nothing worse than the common cold.  

b)     Memory deficits

–        When patients with a history of mild head trauma were reminded of the potential cognitive deficits associated with such an injury they subsequently achieved significantly lower scores on formal neuropsychological memory tests as compared to a mild head injury group who had not been reminded.

c)     Breathlessness

–        Through a process of prior conditioning, breathing difficulties were consistently evoked in healthy university students by the presentation of innocuous sounds that had previously been paired with hypoxic stimuli. This finding strongly suggests that any noise or image that has, in the past, occurred simultaneously with a feeling of breathlessness (for example, the plethora of sights and sounds of a hospital setting, or the perception of approaching a steep flight of steps) can re-trigger feelings of breathlessness.

–        Breathlessness related cues (such as wheezing sounds) can induce breathlessness in asthmatic children

–        An evidence review concluded that, ‘A person’s expectations and mood are major contributors to the function of the brain networks that generate perceptions of breathlessness’. (Our emphasis).

d)     Sneezing & coughing

–        The research participant who had been misled into believing that he had been given the mucous secretions of someone suffering a common cold (referred to in section 1g, above) was later observed to be coughing and sneezing.

e)     Flu-like symptoms

–        A longitudinal study demonstrated that the more a person expected to develop flu-like symptoms (such as coughs, fever, sneezing, and nasal stuffiness) at time 1, the more likely it was that this person would report actual symptoms at time 2. Importantly, this self-fulfilling prophecy was independent of stress levels, suggesting it was belief conviction (about a negative outcome) per se that was the crucial factor.

3.     ABNORMAL PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS

Expectations of negative health outcomes have even been shown to be sufficient to evoke prominent physiological reactions and/or changes in vital signs of health. These observations suggest that nocebo effects not only influence subjective reports and visible behaviour, but can also significantly affect our bodily functions. Examples include:

a)     Vomiting

–        Twenty-two percent of participants in the placebo arm of a chemotherapy trial for cancer developed drug-related vomiting.

b)     Diarrhoea/Gastro-intestinal problems

–        In a drug trial for the treatment of angina, the mention of potential gastro-intestinal problems in the consent form was associated with a six-fold increase in the number of participants withdrawing from the study because of these ailments.

c)     Low blood pressure

–        A documented case study of a young man – at the time a participant in a drug trial – who presented to an Accident & Emergency department believing he had taken a life-threatening overdose of anti-depressant medication. His breathing was rapid, his heart rate well above the norm, and his blood pressure was so low as to require immediate intravenous fluids. When informed that he had been in the placebo arm of the drug trial and had ingested a benign substance, his symptoms rapidly disappeared.

d)     Sexual dysfunction

–        The inclusion of the statement ‘it may cause erectile dysfunction, decreased libido, problems of ejaculation but these are uncommon’ as a potential side effect of a drug trial to treat prostate gland abnormalities resulted in a three-fold increase in subsequent reporting of these sexual difficulties.

4.     SOMATIC PATHOLOGY

The fourth, and arguably the most astounding, category of nocebo effects captures examples of where negative expectation has apparently led to pathology at the cellular level and – in the more extreme instances – death. Examples include: 

a)     Alopecia

–        In a drug trial exploring the effectiveness of chemotherapy for stomach cancer, 31% of participants in the placebo group experienced hair loss.

b)     Inflammation

–        College students who were led to believe that they would suffer headaches at high altitude duly experienced more pain than a control group who were not provided with this negative prediction. Importantly, the students reporting the worst headaches were found to have produced higher levels of inflammatory mediators (chemicals that are released by our immune system to counter inflammation and initiate the healing process).

c)     Skin rashes

–        Some of the Portuguese teenagers triggered by a soap opera to experience a copycat illness (see example 1e, above) were afflicted with skin rashes.

d)     Tumour growth

–        A man (‘Mr Wright’) suffering cancer of the lymph glands was benefiting from an experimental treatment, as evidenced by the drastic shrinkage of his tumours, and he had returned to a state of good health for several months. Later, upon hearing the news that his novel treatment had been debunked, and that it was totally ineffective against cancer, his tumours promptly returned and his health rapidly deteriorated. Mr Wright’s doctors opted to lie, informing him that his original experimental treatment was indeed efficacious, but that he required a much higher dose; in keeping with this false narrative, the clinical team proceeded to inject him with an innocuous saline solution. Astonishingly, his cancer disappeared completely and Mr Wright returned to good health for a further few months until a prestigious medical organisation emphatically concluded that the experimental treatment was indeed useless. In the aftermath of this news, his cancer returned and he died within a few days of being admitted to hospital.

e)     Death

–        Could the nocebo effect be lethal? However implausible this may sound, there have been accounts of ‘hex’ or ‘voodoo’ deaths from reputable observers, typically involving victims embedded within cultures where belief in the power of  curses and the authority of spiritual leaders is deeply rooted. Yet there are occasional reports in Western medical journals that raise the possibility that nocebo effects can be fatal. One instance of where an expectation of death may have been self-fulfilling concerns a man who was informed by doctors that he was riddled with cancer and had only a short while to live. Soon after being given this dire prognosis, the man died, only for the autopsy to reveal that he did not have multiple tumours, and that his demise was inexplicable; his doctor stated, ‘I do not know the pathological cause of his death’.

As can be seen from the above, it is important to recognise the broad scope of nocebo effects, which do not merely encompass internalised, primarily psychological symptoms, but can also manifest as actually measurable physiological disease states of various severities.

The origins of negative expectation

As demonstrated by these multiple examples, the anticipation of an adverse health event is sufficient to make such deleterious outcomes more likely. While prior learning experiences may sometimes play a role in their development, nocebo effects primarily derive from beliefs that a negative bodily change is imminent or, at least, more probable. But from where do these damaging beliefs originate, and what keeps them going?

In general terms, beliefs strengthen, or weaken, on the basis of experiential evidence, what we perceive and notice in our day-to-day lives. Thus, if we become aware of information (physical sensations, emotions, images, external events) that supports our beliefs, the beliefs strengthen and persist. Conversely, if we access information that is inconsistent with our current beliefs, the beliefs weaken and discontinue. Therefore, a crucial question concerning nocebo effects is this: What are the key psychological processes that are likely to fuel unfounded negative predictions about our health?

Lessons from the psychological therapy clinic

When therapists are working with people with severe anxiety problems (such as hypochondriasis, panic attacks, agoraphobia, and obsessive compulsive difficulties), there is a range of cognitive and behavioural strategies, typically adopted by patients, which are widely recognised as counterproductive. The key reason these attempts to cope are deemed to be unhelpful is that they will often enhance conviction in the beliefs that are maintaining their anxiety difficulties – for example, the belief ‘There is something seriously wrong with my heart’ in a patient with health anxiety. Psychological therapy, therefore, strives to minimise the use of these damaging strategies so as to weaken the problematic beliefs and, by so doing, achieve relief for the sufferer.

The six deleterious strategies, along with a brief definition of what each involves and why it is unhelpful, are listed below:

1.     INWARD FOCUS OF ATTENTION: Self-monitoring, repeatedly scanning your body for danger signs.

Unhelpful because:

–        Likely to detect (and misinterpret) benign bodily sensations;

–        It will evoke actual bodily changes e.g. respiratory fluctuations, difficulty swallowing.

2.     SELECTIVE ATTENTION/HYPERVIGILANCE: Repeatedly scanning the external environment for potential ‘threats’.

Unhelpful because:

–        Likely to notice, focus upon, and misinterpret innocuous environmental occurrences.

3.     AVOIDANCE OF DIFFICULT SITUATIONS: Evading situations that are anticipated to evoke anxiety or discomfort.

Unhelpful because:

–        Denies the person the opportunity to discover that these avoided situations may not be as threatening/dangerous as predicted. 

4.     SAFETY BEHAVIOURS: When in situations perceived as risky, engaging in (often subtle) behaviours that are intended to prevent the feared outcome.

Unhelpful because:

–        Prevents disconfirmation of distress-causing beliefs; transforms a benign experience into a ‘near miss’ (like wearing a clove of garlic around your neck to keep the vampires away).

5.     EXCESSIVE CHECKING: Repeatedly gauging a bodily parameter so as to confirm the absence of a feared indicator.

 Unhelpful because:

–        Likely to identify innocuous bodily changes that are then perceived as threatening.

–        Encourages self-focused attention.

The undesirable consequences of excessive checking were illustrated by a recent research study that found that symptom surveillance (via a menstrual monitoring app) was associated with experiencing more severe and persistent menstrual problems.

6.     REASSURANCE SEEKING: Repeatedly seeking information (from other people and/or from written sources) in an effort to disconfirm the threatening belief.

 Unhelpful because:

–        Evokes obsessive preoccupation with feared event.

–        May achieve short-term relief, but exacerbates distress in the long term (like scratching an itchy pimple).

The adoption of any of these behaviours and cognitive activities will result in a strengthening and persistence of the threat-laden beliefs that underpin the patients’ physical and psychological discomfort. Similarly, in the wider world away from the therapy clinic, the activation of one or more of the self-defeating strategies will intensify the beliefs – the negative expectations – that drive nocebo effects.

So what would have been the impact of the covid public health directives upon these six toxic processes? And, in turn, what are the implications of this for the power of nocebo, and its likely contribution to the overall level of harms reported during the ‘pandemic’?   

The nocebo-inducing power of the covid public health directives

It is reasonable to assert that all the main elements of the official covid narrative (restrictions, recommendations, and communications) will have encouraged people – on mass – to resort to counterproductive behavioural and psychological strategies that will have grossly magnified nocebo effects:

1.     FEAR-INDUCING MESSAGING: The fear-inflating impacts of the relentless covid communications have been widely recognised.  The daily death counts, scary images and mantras, and wild catastrophic forecasts of imminent carnage, would have – inevitably – increased the use of all six of the nocebo-strengthening cognitive and behavioural reactions. Thus, any individual led to believe that they are at substantial risk of contracting a deadly illness is much more likely to selectively focus on potential signs of threat (both internal and external), strive for short-term relief via checking and reassurance seeking, minimise the time spent in ‘risky’ situations, and deploy safety behaviours when total avoidance was not possible.

2.     LOCKDOWNS/SOCIAL DISTANCING: A restriction that demanded total avoidance of potentially ‘risky’ locations, and encouraged the deployment of safety behaviours (for instance, swerving away from people on pavements, holding one’s breath when in the vicinity of other human beings). Also, the consequent isolation and boredom would provide a context conducive to self-focused attention and excessive checking. 

3.     MASKS: As well as amplifying fear, the ubiquitous wearing of face coverings in community settings was a prominent/highly visible safety behaviour: ‘I survived going into town today; good job I wore my mask, otherwise who knows what would have happened to me’.

4.     MASS TESTING: The state’s insistence on multiple/repeated – alas, unreliable – testing (PCRs & lateral flow) to determine whether one had ‘the virus’, ensured that many people engaged in excessive checking. It was also a stark example of unhelpful reassurance seeking.

5.     VACCINATION: The mass vaccination programme could be construed as a powerful and pervasive safety behaviour: ‘I might feel unwell now, but just think how much worse it would be if I hadn’t had my second booster’. 

In consideration of the above, it would be accurate to re-name the ‘covid pandemic measures’ as ‘covid nocebo enhancers’.

Victims of ‘covid’, or victims of nocebo?

As demonstrated by multiple research studies and case reports, negative expectation alone is sufficient to evoke symptoms that are indicative of a wide assortment of ailments and illnesses. Most bodily systems seem susceptible to these nocebo effects – pain detection, gastro-intestinal, respiratory, cognitive, reproductive, inflammatory, and cardiovascular – and, in some instances, they may even be capable of accelerating our demise. Clearly, anticipation of malaise is bad for our health.

In relation to the central question about nocebo’s likely contribution to the overall level of reported morbidity during the covid event, the documented examples of how negative expectation can induce flu-like symptoms – or worsen common-cold symptoms – are especially pertinent. And the empirical evidence has shown that – whether it be the evoking of coughs, sneezes, stuffy nose, breathlessness, headaches, sore throat, or fatigue – nocebo effects are up to the task.

Even more striking are the implications of the (previously mentioned) longitudinal study that found that belief conviction about the likelihood of flu symptoms independently predicted their subsequent occurrence, and the evidence review that concluded that expectation is a major contributor ‘to the function of the brain networks that generate perceptions of breathlessness’.

A related point, worthy of note, is that the breathing of a person who is experiencing high levels of anxiety will often be both rapid and shallow, a phenomenon known as ‘hyperventilation’. Research has demonstrated that hyperventilation in physically healthy people can cause significant reductions in the levels of oxygen circulating in their bloodstreams. These findings suggest that, throughout the covid event, a particularly pernicious, nocebo-strengthening vicious circle would have been commonplace:  

1. A person without symptoms takes the recommended test to detect the presence or absence of the ‘deadly virus’, as per public health recommendations;

2. The unreliable test – prone to many false positives – registers the dreaded ‘you’ve got covid’ result;

3. Panic ensues, along with hyperventilation, leading to a significant drop in blood oxygen levels;

4. Subsequent testing of oxygen concentrations, using the widely-available pulse oximetry devices, confirms that the person’s levels are in the danger zone;

5. Further panic and over breathing are evoked, and so on.    

This malignant cycle must have been repeated numerous times during the covid years, amplifying negative expectations of imminent sickness.

Such observations raise intriguing questions about the covid ‘pandemic’, especially since breathlessness was the number one symptom associated with a ‘covid infection’: To what degree did the belief in a ‘deadly virus’ in March 2020 – and subsequent levels of compliance with the toxic restrictions and testing regimes – correlate with sickness levels over the subsequent two years? And to what extent was the frequently-heard assertion ‘I’ve got covid’ tantamount to saying ‘I’m a victim of nocebo?’

Social contagion and mass psychogenic illness; nocebo’s population-level siblings

Doom-laden public health messaging, a selective attentional focus on threatening information in our external environment, and enhanced detection of changes in bodily sensations, would each provide a rich source of evidence for strengthening and sustaining nocebo beliefs. But there is another influential information pathway, as yet unmentioned, that would – throughout the covid event – have unceasingly conveyed pertinent signals as to whether negative expectations about one’s health are justified: the observation of other people. These interpersonal communications – nocebo’s population-level siblings – are often referred to as ‘social contagion’ and ‘mass psychogenic illnesses’.  

Social contagion describes the process by which people unconsciously transmit a facet of their psychology or physiology to others. There are a lot of documented examples, including contagious yawning (one person yawning in a group will often automatically trigger others to do the same), contagious menstruation (women who live in close proximity will, over time, find that their periods synchronise leading to their stop and start dates more closely aligning with each other), and – of more direct relevance to the covid event – contagious dyspnoea (where breathlessness in others can reliably evoke the same in observers). Clearly, we are significantly influenced by the people around us. This tendency to mimic may have had evolutionary advantages; a unified, homogenous, tribe will have had more internal cohesion and be better placed to counter external threats.

When social contagion is rapid and extensive it may escalate into ‘mass psychogenic illness’ (sometimes referred to as ‘mass hysteria’), characterised by a large group of people with shared beliefs quickly developing symptoms suggestive of organic illness in the absence of biological pathology. Typically initiated by an environmental event – such as an unusual odour, strange sound, or a rumour – mass psychogenic illness appears to be fuelled by the sight of other victims and can be aggravated by media reports of an ongoing emergency. Historically, there have been dozens of examples of such intriguing events, including: the ‘Lancashire Cotton Mill Prank’ where, in 1787, the mischievous act of thrusting a mouse down the shirt of a mouse-phobic young woman caused her to fit uncontrollably for 24 hours, the episode subsequently triggering 24 of her co-workers to suffer violent seizures, and – as the rumour spread that it was a poisonous contaminant in the cotton (not the mouse) that was the source of the problem – workers at neighbouring cotton mills to succumb to the same mystery illness; the ‘Dancing Plague of 1518’ where one woman’s six days of frenzied dancing in the searing heat of a Strasbourg street triggered over 400 more people to do likewise, ultimately resulting in many dying of exhaustion; and the ‘Kosovo Student Poisoning’, in which the detection of an unusual aroma led to over a thousand young adolescents being admitted to hospital with symptoms that included breathing difficulties, chest pain, high blood pressure, and dizziness. In all three of these examples, no underlying causative biological agent was ever identified, and the most plausible explanation is that of mass psychogenic illness.

Reflections on the potential power of social contagion and mass psychogenic illness – together with the circumstances that make these two phenomena more likely –  leads one to ponder to what extent these nocebo pathways were active during the covid event.   

Imagine this

If the overarching goal of an evil, omnipotent deity was to maximise the detrimental impact of nocebo effects on the health and wellbeing of a population, how would he go about it?

To kick-start this egregious mission an intense, and unparalleled, level of propaganda would be required to instil high levels of fear. To terrorise the masses, all media outlets – TV, radio, social media, newspapers, and billboards – would simultaneously trumpet the imminent arrival of a mass casualty event: repeated pronouncements of the presence of a uniquely lethal and contagious pathogen; maybe a death meter relentlessly ticking upwards at the bottom of our screens; video footage, piped into our homes, of people collapsing in the street or, maybe, back-logs of coffins too numerous to bury; and authoritative public health experts sharing prophecies of looming catastrophe.

Pervasive terror is a good start, but our evil deity would be aware that conviction in beliefs predicting negative health outcomes needs to be ramped up to the full for every individual citizen if he is to wreak the most harm from nocebo effects. Generalised fear is very helpful in regard to ensuring that people disproportionately focus on potential threats in their environment, but further strengthening of these deleterious beliefs can be achieved in other ways: self-focused attention can be ramped up by social isolation; repeated checking and reassurance seeking can be encouraged by promoting a convenient diagnostic test for the killer disease; and coercing people to engage in useless behaviours under the pretence of keeping them ‘safe’ – by, for example, covering one’s airways with strips of cloth or plastic – will further strengthen people’s beliefs about being in peril. 

The fact that human beings are markedly influenced by what others do and say would not have escaped the notice of our evil deity. Thus, social contagion would be exploited by ensuring mass compliance with the dominant, imminent-catastrophe, narrative through the use of ‘nudge’ strategies that shame (‘your recklessness puts others at risk’) and scapegoat (‘normality would have returned by now if not for the complacent non-conformists’). Multiple social media messages from our compliant friends and associates – referring to having ‘the illness’ or the extreme measures they are taking to keep themselves ‘safe’ – would boost readers’ conviction in their nocebo beliefs that their own future sickness is likely. And just to amplify the impact of this psychological manipulation, why not evoke a distressing symptom in many observers by exploiting the contagiousness of portrayals of breathlessness; recurrent TV images of acutely unwell hospitalised patients gasping for air should do the trick.

While all the unhelpful psychological processes that strengthen nocebo beliefs are in full flow – inward focus of attention, inflated threat perception, self-monitoring, and excessive checking – the all-powerful evil one might promote a rumour that an intriguing, rather distinctive, symptom (maybe something like loss of smell) is characteristic of the deadly disorder, thereby adding a layer of mass psychogenic illness to the nocebo-manufacturing machine.

Does all this sound familiar?

Concluding comments

The covid event was characterised by intense and prolonged propaganda that evoked fear by trumpeting the likelihood of mass casualties; this elevated anxiety per se would have evoked negative expectations of imminent illness (and, therefore, nocebo effects) among many in the general population. The subsequent public health directives would have exacerbated the problem by commanding us all to engage in strategies that would – undoubtedly – have magnified these nocebo effects by selectively skewing the perceived evidence in favour of beliefs predicting future physical health problems. Also, the acquiescence of the bulk of the population will – through the phenomenon of social contagion – have instinctively conveyed to observers that something very dangerous was afoot, thereby further strengthening people’s self-fulfilling prophecies about suffering future physical harms. And these injurious feedback loops will have been amplified by social media at a scale never before possible, the combination of bots and the selective censorship of countervailing views ensuring an unremitting torrent of highly curated messages about a deadly ‘novel virus’. Add the instinctive infectiousness of dyspnoea images to the mix, along with the likely triggering of mass psychogenic illness, and the covid event represents a concurrence of factors that will have created the perfect milieu for nocebo harms.

But what about the indirect negative consequences of nocebo? If the nocebo effects were of sufficient intensity to facilitate an individual’s entry to a hospital bed or to a remote isolation room in a care home, what would the negative expectations of others – in regards to being a ‘covid patient’ – then inflict on you? Iatrogenic harms, and (more worryingly) euthanasia policies, within the healthcare system have been well documented: excessive prescribing of midazolam and morphine; premature ‘do not resuscitate’ orders, misuse of ventilators, and the neglect of patients’ basic needs, were commonplace. Evidently, hospitals and care homes were dangerous places to be during the ‘pandemic’.  

So returning to the central question of this essay: what was the major cause of the harms reported during the covid event? Without doubt – based on the evidence presented, and the above reasoning – one can conclude that the impact of nocebo on the overall morbidity witnessed between 2020 and 2022 has been grossly underestimated. Indeed, one can go further and plausibly suggest that these self-fulfilling expectations of ill health may have been responsible for most of the actual (as opposed to fabricated) physical harms endured during the ‘pandemic’ – particularly so if we include the indirect iatrogenic damage of those unfortunate enough to be tagged as a ‘covid patient’ within our health and social care system.

Were the propagandists within the global pandemic industry aware of the likely devastating impacts of nocebo on the general population? This possibility is less conspiratorial than it might initially seem, not least because the idea of pernicious nocebo is not a new one. The impact of fear and negative expectation on respiratory symptoms has long been recognised; in 1918, during the ‘Spanish Flu’ event, Chicago’s director of public health said, ‘It is our job to keep people from fear; worry kills more than the disease’[ii]. Perhaps, in this instance, history can teach us something supremely important, and on the next occasion when the global elite – in unison with their medical experts – start screaming ‘pandemic’ and prophesying Armageddon, many more of us will be able to ignore these doom merchants, keep calm, and carry on.

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[i]   One of the authors (JE) does not in fact believe that any novel virus emerged, and ALL reported ‘pandemic harms’ were either fraudulently reported (such as described here in relation to Bergamo), or linked to some aspect of the ‘response’ (e.g. harmful hospital and/or care home policies which amounted to euthanasia, as described here). In other words, to the extent that there were harms NOT caused by the nocebo effects being discussed here, that is not to be taken as any concession that such harms were caused by a novel circulating virus.

[ii] Roytas, D. (2024). Can you catch a cold: Untold history & human experiments, p210. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-You-Catch-Cold-Experiments/dp/1763504409