FAKED: University of Washington study falsely reported that drugging kids with puberty blockers helped with their mental issues

The University of Washington has provided yet another example of how the far left has permanently damaged our institutions, our culture, and our society.

According to Seattle radio talk host Jason Rantz, the university, in conjunction with Seattle Children’s Hospital, claimed in a study that ‘gender-affirming care’ using puberty blockers led to positive mental health outcomes in transgender teen patients, but it turns out that was a lie. As such, the study was subjected to “substantial edits to the materials used to promote the study and prompting UW to cease promoting the research,” he wrote.

But despite those facts, communications staff for the university decided not to proactively address “some pretty concerning claims” regarding the study because it had already received glowing attention from the patently dishonest left-wing ‘mainstream’ media, according to emails that Rantz exclusively obtained and shared on his KTTH show.

“In fact, the UW Medicine communications staff never reached out to media outlets that offered incorrect coverage based on the faulty press materials,” he wrote on the station’s website.

He adds:

Fourth-year UW Medicine student Arin Collin and UW epidemiology Ph.D. candidate Diana Tordoff tracked the mental health of 104 transgender patients aged 13 to 20 for a year. The patients received gender-affirming care, which the researchers defined as taking either Leuprolide, Testosterone, or Estradiol.

According to data allegedly collected from various patients, researchers and UW Medicine noted in a press release that the gender-affirming care “dramatically reduces” depression, going on to call the treatment “lifesaving care.” The study was subsequently published in the JAMA Open Network.

On March 11, UW Medicine claimed in a press released titled “Gender-affirming care dramatically reduces depression for transgender teens, study finds,” that “researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.”

However, in reality the study did not claim that. In fact, according to the data, there was almost no improvement in mental health outcomes involving patients who were given gender-affirming care. But because of the false manner in which the data was presented, the lamestream leftist media gave the study glowing reviews, Rantz noted:

KING 5 uncritically reported the study’s press release. Psychology Today added it to a list of studies showing the beneficial impacts of gender-affirming care. It received positive support from Science Friday. 

The original press release from UW Medicine was also overtly political. It pushed back against Republican-backed legislation concerning gender-affirming care, explicitly calling out Texas and Idaho.

“This research comes as the nation’s largest pediatric hospital announced this month it has stopped gender-affirming therapies after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of gender-affirming care for children as abuse. This week, a bill passed the Idaho State House which would make providing gender-affirming care a felony,” the press release said initially.

Another giveaway that the ‘research’ was overtly political to begin with: Study authors wrote in an essay that their falsified results would help refute “anti-transgender legislation.”

Independent journalist Jesse Singal took apart the study brilliantly on his Substack.

He wrote that “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.”

“It’s hard even to figure this out from reading the study, which omits some very basic statistics one would expect to find, but the non-result is pretty clear from Table 3 in the supplementary materials, which shows what percentage of study participants met the researchers’ thresholds for depression, anxiety, and self-harm or suicidal thoughts during each of the four waves of the study,” he added.

“The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems,” Singal noted further.

After his lengthy takedown was published, Rantz notes that UW Medicine’s internal emails show that officials were working behind the scenes to mitigate the bad information and eventually engaged in some “quiet edits” of the original study — but did not publicize them.

“UW researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents likely decreased rates of depression and suicidality,” was one change that was made n the UW Medicine website, replacing the word “plummeted.” It also added a note at the top of the page: “[April 8, 2022: Editor’s note: Language has been updated below to more directly reflect the findings as reported in the study].”

However, that wasn’t good enough, either, according to an email from the study team:

I think it is important to note that this language is still not quite accurate. We did not observe a decrease in the rates of depression. We saw that youth who initiated PB/GAH has a lower odds of depression compared to youth who didn’t because depressive symptoms significantly worsened among youth who did NOT initiate PB/GAH. These are different (and has been particularly hard nuance to maintain re: science comm for this study). I think “mitigate” is an appropriate word to use instead of decrease.

The edit was made but it was too late: Media outlets had already reported the false information.

Face it: ‘Science’ has become as politicized as other exact disciplines like mathematics, physics, and medicine, thanks to the destructive ideology of the left. And this has all been on purpose.

Sources include:

MyNorthwest.com

JesseSingal.Substack.com