It's the First Annual Wellness, Actually Grab Bag Episode!

Perry Wilson (0:01)

Well, hello, Emily and Tamar.

Emily Oster (0:03)

Hi, Perry.

Tamar Avishai (0:04)

Hi.

Perry Wilson (0:05)

So exciting. We have sort of a guest today. We have Tamar Avishai. She's our producer. And Tamar, do you want to tell the good people why we have dragged you in to your closet to be on the show with us today?

Tamar Avishai (0:21)

Okay. Well, first of all, my closet is my recording booth. So let's not denigrate the closet.

Emily Oster (0:27)

I want people to understand that Tamar is so professional that her closet has sound protection on the wall next to her clothing. It's a very high-end professional look here.

Tamar Avishai (0:37)

Yes. Thank you. So today, we have actually solicited from our listening audience, smaller wellness fads that people have questions about, but that might not necessarily take a 45-minute deep dive. And in fact, I'm only going to give you three minutes per deep dive, but we'll explain all the rules at a later time.

Perry Wilson (1:02)

So I love this idea, although obviously, I'm going to be the worst at this game. At this game that we're playing.

SPEAKER_5 (1:10)

No chance for you here. Yeah, no, I know.

Tamar Avishai (1:11)

That's fine.

Perry Wilson (1:11)

This I know, but that's okay.

This, because when we do what we do, our friends come up to us and people come up to us all the time, and they're like, oh, you should talk about vampire facials and stuff. And we're like, oh, that's a great topic. But then as Emily and I bounced it off each other, we're like, I don't know that we have an hour to spend on this. Like, it's a kind of quick thing to talk about what the deal is. And there were enough of these that came in that we came up with the idea of, like, what if we did a grab bag? What if we just did all those little things that can get answered quickly? Now, to be fair, as I was doing some research, I was sort of like, oh, okay, we could build some of these out, I think, into a deeper episode. But for now.

Emily Oster (1:51)

For sure, we could. But I think we can hit the high points of most of these in three minutes, and then I decided it should be competitive because I spent much of my life answering questions on Instagram, where I only get 90 seconds. And so I'm very confident in my ability to win. And that's when I like to introduce competition, when I know this can result in success.

Perry Wilson (2:15)

This is the same reason my son always wants to play chess with me, because he knows I'm pretty easy. All right, we've got Tamar fully closeted.

Tamar Avishai (2:27)

Without a dog in this fight, I should add.

Emily Oster (2:29)

We'll see.

Perry Wilson (2:29)

Let's get started.

Emily Oster (2:33)

I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and a data expert.

Perry Wilson (2:36)

And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor.

Emily Oster (2:38)

It's Thursday, September 24th, 2026, and this is Wellness, Actually.

Perry Wilson (2:43)

Because you're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information nowadays from every source imaginable. And some of it is awesome.

Emily Oster (2:51)

And some of it is, well, actually bullsh**. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, how to parse the data, and can tell you what's worth thinking about and what you can safely ignore.

Perry Wilson (3:05)

But before we dig in, a note that this podcast is for educational purposes and should not be construed as medical advice. We don't know your unique situation, so talk to your doctor for personal health decisions.

Emily Oster (3:17)

This week, we're doing our first ever Wellness, Actually Grab Bag episode. You asked, we're answering. But first, the health news of the week after the break.

And now for the health news of the week. Perry, I want to start with an article in the BMJ, which is a prominent medical journal. This is an investigation about the US vaccine adverse event reporting system, which basically argues that some combination of the, particularly the CDC, maybe a little bit the FDA, did not appropriately report COVID vaccine complications out of this reporting system they have. The article is pretty in the weeds, but I think it's important enough that we should talk about it.

Perry Wilson (4:11)

Yeah, you're right. This is a challenging one, but we'll try to keep it to the high level thing here, and this is important because obviously, the COVID vaccines are surrounded by a lot of conspiracy theories. There's a lot of genuine concerns about them. There's a lot of positive things about them, and you just get so much information, especially if you're online from people that, to be honest, I think are often cherry picking data to push their particular point of view here. So let's try to keep it to the facts. This is reported by David Wilman in the BMJ. So first thing to note, VAERS, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, is a disaster of a data set.