placebo

Conducting a trial that is randomized and placebo-controlled, meaning some participants will get the vaccine and others will get a placebo, helps eliminate the “healthy volunteer effect” commonly seen in observational studies.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 15, 2026

"We don't know if it's a placebo effect. We don't know the long-term effect of this type of treatment."

From BBC ● Sep. 12, 2026

Amgen stock shed 10% after Novartis announced that its heart-disease drug, pelacarsen, failed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular events compared with a placebo.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 8, 2026

The company said the late-stage study for its pelacarsen drug missed its primary objective of reducing the risk of cardiovascular events like death, heart attack and stroke compared with placebo.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 7, 2026

As it happens, Denis Papin, who had qualified as a doctor, was the first to describe the placebo and the placebo effect, in a letter to Leibniz, 11 or 12 August 1704.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

The U-turns mark a broader retreat from demands, pushed under former FDA vaccines and biotech drugs division leader Vinay Prasad, that rare-disease drugmakers test their experimental medicines against placebos to make sure the drugs work.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 2026

These sessions used an "open-label placebo" approach, meaning participants were aware that some practices were presented as placebos.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 7, 2026

When he dug into other papers, he concluded that placebos were, on average, effective about 35 percent of the time.

From Slate ● Jan. 30, 2026

While studies showed that Sarepta’s Amondys 45 and Vyondys 53 treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy worked better than placebos, the company said the results did not reach statistical significance.

From MarketWatch ● Nov. 3, 2025

If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.

From "It’s Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini