Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has had a long love affair with Junk Science, and as secretary of health and human services he has embraced it again, the most brutal to justify his false claims that cause vaccines autism. Last week he brought a sadly designed study into another fight. In a hearing from a senate committee, he quoted one report That few scientists like science would recognize to justify an FDA security evaluation of the drug mipeler pristone, which is used in most abortions in the United States.
President Donald Trump had previously asked HHS to study the safety of the medicine, and Kennedy emphasized during the hearing that an assessment of the drug would be a top -fda priority. The unusually high speed of side effects identified in the report, he noted, “indicates that the label must at least be changed.” In other words, the best American health officer is willing to rework – at least partly based on a poorly designed report that has not undergone a scientific assessment – the government’s official guidelines on a commonly used drug.
The report that Kennedy had cited was posted at the end of last month on the website of the Ethics and public policy centerA DC -based think tank in Washington, aimed at “pushing back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives,” her website said. The authors of the study, Jamie Bryan Hall, director of Data Analysis of EPPC, and Ryan Anderson, the president of the organization, are not health experts, and neither seems to have a record of publishing scientific research through Peer Review. Their methods have deviated wildly from what is standard In the world of health research, and so, predictable, their conclusions have done: in stark contrast with Dozens of tasting The EPPC report has carried out all over the world throughout the world and found that Mifepristone is a danger for women.
The EPPC has written that the report “presents a careful and conservative assessment of the safety of abortus pill.” However, the research lacks fundamental transparency about how that assessment was made. The authors relied on data from an insurance database that, according to the report, contained more than 800,000 Mifepristone Abortuses from 2017 to 2023. But the authors don’t really say which database they used, so “there is no way for someone to try to reinstall their analysis to see if they receive the same results,” ” Sara ReddFrom the Center for Reproductive Health Research in The Southeast at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, I told me. (In an e -mail, Hunter Estes, the communication director of EPPC, told me that the center of the center with their data seller prevents EPPC from sharing the name of the database or even the supplier. But he added: “This insurance data is available at about a dozen data brokers and is used on a large scale.”
The report also took some special methodological steps to reach the conclusions. One of the most important findings is that more than 10 percent of people who take Mifepristone experience what the study calls ‘serious side effects’. ((A variety by study Set the percentage of significant side effects from medical abortions with Mifepristone with less than 0.3 percent, which makes the medicine safer Dan Tylenol and Viagra.) But the unusually broad criteria of the EPPC study for defining those events raises many questions. The researchers counted Ectopic pregnancy as a side effect and argued that doctors should have excluded it before they prescribe Mifepistone. (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists acknowledges that Mifepristone can be dangerous in cases of ectopic pregnancy, but out That the exclusion of the rare condition – a process involving an ultrasound is not necessary – is not necessary for most women taking the medicine.) The authors had episodes in which a surgical procedure was needed to complete the abortion after mifepriston – patient requires an additional treatment in about 20 cases, so the FDA considers a recognized output effect. They counted ‘other life-threatening side effects’, including heart problems and worries about mental health, which women experienced in the study in the weeks after the abortion what might have nothing to do with Mifepristone.
They also counted ‘serious’ events that were documented during visits to first aid within 45 days after a patient who took Mifepristone. However, the report does not fully explain how they knew that those events were connected to Mifepistone, and to assess which were counted as ‘seriously’, they used a scale designed For cancer research, which is not validated for use in Studies from Abortuszorg. The loosely counting the emergency room visits could artificially inflate the estimate of the risk of getting an abortion. study She led from abortion -related emergency visits from 2009 to 2013, half of the patients had such mild symptoms that they did not need treatment. She also said that the authors did not make an effective distinction between the results of abortions and miscarriages treated with mifepriston, or between normal quantities of bleeding after abortion and severe bleeding.
In the weeks following the publication of the report, EPPC published two follow -up documents With more details about the methodology of the study, which experts told me that they are still not convincing. As the documents explained, the authors relied on diagnostic codes to separate miscarriages, which are often also treated with Mifepristone, from abortions – a practice that can deliver inaccurate result. The report only included suicidal and murderous ideas in diagnoses of mental health care categorized as serious side effects but that still proves that those diagnoses were connected to an abortion, Redd told me. The “only codes with regard to bleeding or severe bleeding (according to the FDA definition)”-which would still not be sufficient to distinguish between the normal amount of post-mifristone bleeding and something more serious, said Upadhyay.
According to EPPC, Peer Review of the report was not possible due to “extensive Pro-Abortion Bias in the Peer-Review process”, but a group of data scientists, analysts and engineers “performed and validated” the project, with the help of doctors. None of their names appears in the report. When I asked about that decision, the EPPC representative wrote: “It is routine for individuals with controversial opinions to be subjected to a series of personal and professional attacks, including threats of violence in their own houses.”
Until now, the most common attacks on their study have been going on. Alice MarkAn OB-Gyn and the medical director of the National Abortion Federation told me that “it is to call it too much worthy.” Some proponents of anti-abortion have also warned against exaggerating the strictness of the study: earlier this month, Politics reported that Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obgyns, said On a private zoom call with anti-abortion leaders that although the report contains credible data and should inspire further research, the “not a study in the traditional sense” and “no conclusive evidence of anything” is.
Anti-abortion activists have long seen Mifepristone as a problem. In the years since the Supreme Court’s decision to annul the national right to abortion, abortions have been partially increased due to a 2021 FDA decision That permitted Mifepristone and Misoprostol (a medicine that is often used in parallel for abortion) to be prescribed and emailed via TeleHealth. According to reporting by Politicsquestioning the safety of Mifepristone is part of a larger one strategy called “Rolling Thunder” who aims to cut it off. High quality data has those questions cannot validate, so second -class research is often used to make the case against Mifepistone. In 2023, for example, a federal judge ruled The fact that Mifepristone must be removed from the market by referring low quality studies that reported adverse effects of Mifepristone. (The Supreme Court later threw away the lawsuit on procedural grounds.) Due to their “lack of scientific strictness”, two of the investigated investigations were ultimately withdrawn by the magazine she had published.
If the FDA has evaluated the safety of Mifepristone in the past – what it has done several times since the first approval of Mifepristone, in 2000 – it will have that extensively Access to Mifepristone instead of limiting it. If the Mifepistone agency is evaluating again and can assess its staff independently, the FDA could release its rules for Mifepistone even more, Elizabeth RaymondAn OB-Gyn and a researcher who specializes in Mifepristone Safety, I told me. A lot of data support using Mifepristone later in pregnancy than is currently approved, for example.
But Upadhyay told me that she is worried that FDA Chief Marty Makary – who has previously claimed These fetuses can ‘resist’ the aids of abortion by 20 weeks of pregnancy – or Kennedy could put their thumb on the scale to limit Mifepristone access, regardless of what FDA employees recommend. “I don’t want them to do a review because I don’t trust them to base decisions they make on science,” said Upadhyay. (HHS and the FDA did not answer my questions about the plans of the FDA to assess Mifepistone safety on the basis of the EPPC report. In an e -mail, an HHS spokesperson told me about the FDA: “The agency evaluates Rigoureus the newest scientific data, making Gold Standard Science.”
Although Kennedy said he Reads scientific articles critically For the living, his approach to medical literature is most like “an extreme version of what lawyers do to defend a client: create a story and then find supportive evidence”, “, Robert CaliffWho led the FDA among presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, told me an e -mail. The scientific method includes the opposite: constructing a hypothesis and trying to refute it with an open mind. When different people who perform the same experiment come to the same conclusion, this is not a sign of a shared ideology; It is a sign of a shared reality.
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