According to a new scientific paper, the Obama administration made a mistake that deepened the opioid crisis and triggered the skyrocketing of deadly hepatitis C infections.

As the authors of the paper “A Transitioning Epidemic: How The Opioid Crisis Is Driving The Rise In Hepatitis C” suggest, Hepatitis C kills more Americans every year than any other infectious disease. The Washington Free Beacon adds, “Once infected, the virus can take ten to forty years to fully induce its effects; the results, however, are eventually deadly unless treated.”

Although the number of acute cases of Hepatitis C declined in the years before 2003, when the number of cases stabilized, the number started rising in 2010, apparently after the Obama administration’s FDA permitted Purdue Pharma, the producers of Oxycontin, to reformulate the drug, which users had typically crushed in order to get the oxy needed for a more protracted high. The new version of the drug was offered in a version that left it useless after being crushed, which was thought an effective technique for reducing the deaths among people using it.

Instead, as the paper surmises, many of the former users of Oxyxcontin turned to injecting themselves with heroin, leaving them vulnerable to getting Hepatitis C from unsanitized needles.

The paper notes, “States with above-median OxyContin misuse before the reformulation experienced a 222 percent increase in hepatitis C infection rates in the post-reformulation period, while states with below-median misuse experienced only a 75 percent increase. These results suggest that interventions to deter opioid misuse can have unintended long-term public health consequences.”

The Beacon notes that the new paper “is a spiritual successor to a 2018 paper by economists William Evans, Ethan Lieber, and Patrick Power. ‘How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic,’ which stated, ‘The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality. Each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death.’”

NovusDetox explained why Oxycontin users moved to heroin, as it explained the difference in cost for users:

A hit of heroin is a fraction of the cost of the same high from OxyContin (or oxycodone). Prescription narcotics generally sell on the illicit street market at around $1 per milligram. A one-time high from an 80 milligram oxycodone pill for an experienced user would run roughly $80. Heroin, on the other hand, sells in many areas for around $100 a gram. Depending on a user’s tolerance level (long-time users need more per dose) a gram can deliver up to 20 doses, or highs. In other words, it’s vastly less expensive to get and stay stoned on heroin than OxyContin.

The Beacon concludes, “In other words, the new study further confirms that the prescription drug crackdown cannot really abate the opioid crisis. Recent research in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that controlling prescription opioids would only reduce drug deaths by 3 to 6 percent by 2025. Even if all prescription drug abuse stopped in 2016, the paper argued, almost 580,000 people would still die from opioid overdose over the subsequent nine years.”

If ever there’s a study that shows even a slight difference between the treatment of boys and girls, or men and women, the media will run with it while crying sexism has been proven.

The most recent example comes from a study on participants’ reactions to seeing a child cry while getting their blood drawn. Participants were then told either the child was named “Samantha” or “Samuel” and asked to rate his or her pain based on what they saw in the video. The results showed, overall, that “Samantha’s” pain was rated at 45.9 on a 100-point scale and “Samuel’s” pain was rated at 50.4 on the same scale.

Cue the dramatic outrage.

“Why Are We Still Dismissing Girls’ Pain,” wrote Laurie Edwards, a “science writer” at the New York Times.

“A new study finds Americans take the pain of girls less seriously than that of boys,” was the headline from CNN.

“Study shows gender bias starts early with girls’ pain taken less seriously,” wrote USA Today.

“Parents Take Young Boys’ Pain More Seriously Than Young Girls’ Pain,” said the headline from Fatherly.

“Hmm, Apparently People Don’t Care As Much When Girls Cry As When Boys Do,” wrote Cosmopolitan, naturally.

And on it goes.

Brian D. Earp, one of the researchers for the paper, took to Twitter to point out how the media got his study so wrong.

“From gender bias to media bias? A thread on how our study looking at adult perceptions of children’s pain got misconstrued. A reminder of the importance of taking media coverage with a grain of salt, reading original studies when possible, and guarding against confirmation bias,” Earp wrote.

He then provided screenshots of the headlines listed above and explained how the media completely invented the notion that the results showed “parents” or “Americans” didn’t care about the pain of young girls.

“First, the effect in our study was observed *only* in female participants–not ‘Americans’ or ‘parents’ or ‘people’ in general. In fact, male participants rated girl pain *higher* than boy pain (albeit not to a statistically significant degree),” Earp tweeted.

Also, according to Earp, the study “did not measure ‘sexism’ or ‘credibility’ or the extent to which adult raters “cared” about the pain of boys vs. girls–or even whether they took the pain of boys ‘more seriously’ than that of girls” and it didn’t “show that pain is ‘often missed’ in girls.”

Further, while the overall difference in participants’ rating of the child’s pain was “statistically significant,” the researchers don’t know what the practical or clinical significance is yet and does not speculate as to that effect. But here’s the real kicker, from Earp:

“But even more importantly, we go on to note that the difference was driven entirely by female participants: when you look at men only, there is NO statistical difference in ratings; when you look at women, it’s 45.7 for Samantha vs. 53.1 for Samuel (effect size d = .34).”

This means that it is women who judge boys’ pain as more significant than girls’ pain, which completely blows the sexism argument out of the water. Earp, says he and the other researchers “did not predict this” and “are not sure how to explain the observed female-only bias in ratings of child pain based on perceived gender.”

He did offer one possible explanation: That the idea that “boys don’t cry” affected the participants’ views toward “Samuel’s” pain level.

“The inference might go something like this: ‘Boys in our culture are taught to act tough & strong when they are in pain & not to cry out, so if a boy DOES cry out… & express he is in pain, then perhaps he is experiencing quite a lot of pain–enough to behave in a way that boys are stereotypically taught not to behave,’” Earp tweeted. “If that is the right explanation, it would say nothing about not taking girls’ pain (as) seriously, dismissing their pain, caring less about their pain, etc.”

Earp eventually concluded that this was a “complex” issue that needs further study, but his Twitter thread is an important read on how the media is awful at factually reporting the findings of various studies. Most reporters almost never read the full study and only look at the executive summary. I’ve documented several instances of this before, and they almost always come from studies where reporters can get a “sexism” headline from the results.