Gender-Affirming Care Messages Leaked; Docs Doxxed for Oxy? HCQ Doc’s Work Retracted

Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

Gender-Affirming Care Group’s Messages Leaked, Weaponized

Last week, messages from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) were leaked in a think-tank report, and two messages in particular were framed as proof that gender-affirming care can have serious health risks, such as cancer. One of the leaked messages was about a 16-year-old patient who was on birth control for several years as well as gender-affirming testosterone for one year, who developed two benign liver tumors. The other message was about someone who died of liver cancer after taking testosterone for nearly a decade, though the poster didn’t have additional details since the patient had died.

But a STAT investigation had independent experts look through the leaked messages, and they concluded that the think-tank report “oversimplifies the complex role of hormones in the body” and makes false correlations.

The report was from Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear energy environmental think-tank founded by Michael Shellenberger who is openly critical of gender-affirming care and reportedly said he wants to shut down WPATH, an organization that aims “to promote evidence-based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health” per its website. It has more than 2,700 members who discuss clinical care for trans and gender-diverse patients.

“To say that any one hormone that’s given to an individual is going to drive tumors — it’s pretty naive,” Simon Knott, PhD, a researcher and co-director of the Applied Genomics Shared Resource Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai in New York City, told STAT.

While scientists know that hormones in general can increase a person’s cancer risk, gender-affirming hormone therapy “will not typically create a problem, as those [estrogen and testosterone] levels stay within a normal range for the human body” and all major medical organizations support gender-affirming care.

Docs Doxxed for Oxy?

Hackers have figured out an elaborate scheme to dox doctors and order drugs like oxycodone, Adderall, codeine, and fentanyl, per an investigation by 404 Media.

Basically, hackers phish for doctors’ personal information, including their National Provider Identifier (NPI) and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) numbers, which are used to order controlled substances. With this information, they get access to drug ordering platforms and prescribe medication to accounts linked to real peoples’ identities. Then, “runners” with fake IDs pick up the medications from a pharmacy.

Electronic prescriptions are fairly ubiquitous and are supposed to be more secure and harder to counterfeit. Rahi Abouk, PhD, of William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, told 404 Media that the main purpose of developing electronic prescriptions was to prevent forgery and doctor shopping.

404 Media gained access to a Telegram Messenger group that discusses the logistics of this scheme and spoke to some of the fraudsters. Not all of the fraudsters phish for doctors’ personal information themselves. Rather, some purchase it online for cheap. And hackers are targeting the prescription system itself as well as “third party doctor portals” and companies in the drug supply chain, like Tebra, EzriRx, MastersRx, and McKesson.

Didier Raoult’s Work Retracted

French microbiologist Didier Raoult, MD, PhD, published research extensively and rose to fame during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But his work often lacked ethical approvals, and since his retirement in 2021, much of his work has been retracted and investigated, according to recent reporting by Science.

Raoult has pushed back and argued the research is sound because none of it fell under French bioethics law, with which critics disagree.

For a decade, Raoult led the infectious disease research at Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), associated with Aix-Marseille University. Early in the pandemic, Raoult said hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was an effective COVID treatment. He even published a paper reporting that IHU found a combination of HCQ and azithromycin effectively treated COVID-19. But independent experts found the work to be problematic, with issues on study design and data analysis. Plus, one of the co-authors was the editor-in-chief of the journal in which it was published.

This was a recurring problem, but Raoult and the IHU’s work had more problems, too. French journalist Victor Garcia dove deep into Raoult’s work and found that 17 of Raoult’s studies used the same ethical approval number despite having different methods and investigating different questions. Further analysis found that studies from IHU reportedly did the same thing.

Plus, some of Raoult’s work revealed that IHU continued to prescribe HCQ long after France withdrew it as a treatment option, per the Science article.

Since Raoult and IHU’s work was brought into question, multiple journals have retracted studies and many of those involved with the research are being investigated by various governing bodies.

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