Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Feb 22, 2023 20 tweets 12 min read Read on X
A #CROI2023 special session on #mpox. Some live tweets: Image
Dr. John Brooks, an internist at CDC office of prevention, speaks about #mpox. He notes that we've seen declines worldwide in new cases. 2/ Image
Mpox likely transmitted most via contact with skin and the anorectal area. #CROI2023 3/ Image
Dr. Brooks says, "We don't really know" why #mpox has declined so dramatically. He speculates vaccination and sexual behavior change in gay and bi men likely contributed. He does not mention my theory that the virus ran out of people with high frequency of new partners to infect. Image
Dr. Brooks calls for completion of the clinical trial of antiviral TPOXX , something that is difficult without many cases of #mpox occurring. He says people need to get vaccinated against mpox now before Pride season returns. #CROI2023 Image
Dr. Brooks notes that presymptomatic transmission of #mpox is possible. #CROI2023 Image
Dr. Sharon Frey, Clinical Director, Center for Vaccine Development, St. Louis University: MOLECULAR PATHOGENESIS AND THERAPEUTIC TARGETS FOR MPOX VIRUS lecture
Jynneos has been vaccinated intradermally: Image
Dr. Frey compares smallpox and #mpox at #CROI2023. "The presentation of mpox when it is sexually transmitted is very different from what we know of mpox in the past." Image
Dr. Frey reviews the history of smallpox vaccination. #CROI2023 Image
Post-9/11, Iraq war era, Bush's administration was afraid that Iraq would use biological warfare. It turns out Iraq did not have smallpox on hand. Regardless, a program began to develop a new vaccine for smallpox. #CROI2023 Image
The history of #mpox. #CROI2023
Dr. Frey says that quote about the virus disappearing because of ecological changes has the matter backward. Image
The 21st century #mpox outbreaks.
#CROI2023 Image
A play-by-play of the 2022 #mpox outbreak. Note that researchers later realized there had been signs of the virus in the UK by early April. #CROI2023 Image
The CDC's John Brooks says that there are an est 2M Americans who would be good candidates for #mpox vaccination, because they are a man who has sex with men at risk of sexual acquisition and/or a person with HIV. 1.2M doses have been given; only 470,000 people have both doses.
A PhD student from @fredhutch says there has been "historical revisionism" going on in the talks in today's session. Yes, he says, there was decrease in sexual activity. "I think the LGBTQ community felt very let down by the public health infrastructure."
The @fredhutch student says, "We kind of had to take care of ourselves." He refers to the delay in the vaccine arriving on US shores. "I don't mean to tell you that this is bad or anything, but I don't necessarily think this is as rosy as being presented." (Applause)
"Now is the time to protect yourself. Prepare to be protected so you can take care of yourself in the future," said Dr. John Brooks of CDC at #CROI2023, anticipating that #mpox might rise again with the arrival of #LGBTQ Pride season. Will we see another mpox summer? Image
@MegDoherty_HIV of @WHO in Geneva says there's no guarantee that the public health emergency of international concern regarding #mpox will continue. She asks about the best way to continue monitoring and surveillance and not to lose momentum in combatting the virus. #CROI2023
Dr. John Brooks says, "We have the tools that work, how do we make sure we have equitable access to those around the world." The problem of #mpox, he says at #CROI2023, is growing in W and Central Africa.

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More from @benryanwriter

Jul 25
Dr. Marci Bowers, president of @WPATH, reiterates a position WPATH made in the spring, saying that gender-transition treatment is right for the "vast majority" of children with gender dysphoria, according to @MackenzieMays's @LATimes article about @ChoooCole.

There are an estimated 300,000 adolescents who identify as transgender. So that would mean putting some 200,000 or more of them on the medical pathway, with tens of thousands more put on puberty blockers and hormones each year.Image
How California teen Chloe Cole emerged as a leader of the ‘detransition’ movement — and a right-wing icon
.latimes.com/california/sto…
Paywall free link:
How California teen Chloe Cole emerged as a leader of the ‘detransition’ movement — and a right-wing icon
archive.is/20240725114436…
Read 9 tweets
Jul 21
Kennedy asserts that the Cass Review “has already been discredited by 3 peer-reviewed publications.”
She cites:
1) Cal Horton’s criticism of Cass’s interim report, which Horton published before the Cass Review came out
2) McNamara et al’s non-peer-reviewed white paper, which was not published in a journal, rather was placed on the Yale Law School’s website
3) Noone et al, which is a preprint and not a published journal article.
@natachakennedy
Noone:
McNamara:
Horton: osf.io/preprints/osf/…
law.yale.edu/sites/default/…
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…Image
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After falsely claiming that the Cass Review has been discredited by three peer-reviewed publications, transfeminist sociologist Dr. @NatachaKennedy says it is "hilarious" that the "transphobes can't make up their minds as to whether Cass was peer-reviewed or not." (It wasn't.) Image
Read 9 tweets
Jul 20
When I was reporting about monkeypox, people put me under intense, explicit pressure not to report the facts about the outbreak’s epidemiology, namely that sex between men was overwhelmingly and consistently how it transmitted. I was told that if I told people this I would cause antigay stigma. This always struck me as patently ridiculous and also egregiously counterproductive. Gay men needed the facts about the virus so they could protect themselves. And misleading everyone else to think they were more than very, very, very remotely at risk only caused needless anxiety and undermines the credibility of public-health voices. Children were literally more likely to get struck by lightening than to contract the virus. Gay men’s mpox acquisition rate, I estimated, was some 45,000 times greater than children’s.
Then there were the gay guys who lost their damn minds when I said gay guys should engage in sexual-behavior modification to lower their risk of mpox, a horrific infection causing many of their brethren harrowing physical pain. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
Incidentally, the guy with the "Where Is Your Rage?" sign in the photo that WaPo used for my oped, who recently got his PhD in European intellectual history from Princeton, was incensed to be associated with my arguments that gay men should engage in sexual behavior change to mitigate their monkeypox risk, which he found repugnant. He was especially enraged that I had criticized the CDC for refusing to even mention the word "men" in their monkeypox safer sex material, despite the fact, I noted, that sex between men was the overwhelming mode of transmission. (Why so cagey, CDC?) So the academic guy kept DMing me after my WaPo piece came out to call me a TERF. (Still new to being dragged on Twitter, I was telling my therapist about all this, and the poor man finally had to say, with utter bewilderment bordering on exasperation, "What is a TERF??)

Earlier this year, I read a screed that the academic guy published on HuffPost on Aug. 6, 2022, about what a mess the public-health response to mpox was. () And there he was, arguing that we never should've associated monkeypox with gay sex. (He engaged in a lot of finger pointing elsewhere, at the government and such. Some of that was surely deserved, mind you. But the point of what I wrote in WaPo was that gay men also needed to just protect themselves in the meantime by engaging in the same kind of sexual risk mitigation they had in the 80s with AIDS. We are adults, after all. Right?) This despite the fact that by the time he published the piece, there was pretty good data being published showing that this was indeed overwhelmingly transmitting via sex between men. (See: ) This fact never changed from week to week; and it never did for the remainder of the outbreak (which continues at a very slow burn to this day).

He also fell for the false belief that the virus was going spread substantially among kids. This despite the fact that it was already quite clear by Aug 6, 2022, when he published the piece that the virus largely required quite an intense among of physical intimacy--namely, sexual intercourse--to transmit. This virus was not going to tear through kindergartens like mad. And indeed it never did. There was not one instance of the virus transmitting between children in a day care or school anywhere outside of the nations in Africa where the virus is endemic. Not one. Ever.

Then the academic guy indignantly wrote that despite the fact that many of his friends were in agonizing pain from mpox, the media kept telling everyone that the disease was mild until finally, The Guardian covered all the true horrors on July 23, 2022. Um, ahem, but I was the one who broke the story about how awful mpox was, on July 6: .huffpost.com/entry/monkeypo…
nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-he…Image
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Read 4 tweets
Jul 19
BREAKING: The NHS's Dept. of Health and Social Welfare review refutes claims by @JolyonMaugham of @GoodLawProject of suicide surge in gender-distressed minors referred for treatment at GIDS
This review, by By Professor Louis Appleby, University of Manchester Department of Health and Social Care adviser on suicide prevention, reaches the same conclusions as my reporting for the @NewYorkSun. He writes in summary:
▶️"The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock.
▶️"The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.
▶️"The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence.
▶️"There is a need to move away from the perception that puberty-blocking drugs are the main marker of non-judgemental acceptance in this area of health care.
"We need to ensure high quality data in which everyone has confidence, as the basis of improved safety for this at risk group of young people."

Activist-blogger @ErinInTheMorn Erin Reed repeated the false claims of Mr. Maugham on @MajorityFM with @EmmaVigeland this week.

Here is the NHS review:
gov.uk/government/pub…Image
Claim of Suicide Surge in Youths on U.K. Wait List for Gender Care Undermined by ‘Cass Review’, I reported for the @NewYorkSun. My reporting has now been backed by a review by the NHS.
nysun.com/article/claim-…
Activist-blogger Erin Reed @ErinInTheMorn went on @MajorityFM with @EmmaVigeland this week and made false claims about suicides in gender-distressed British youth that have now been refuted by an NHS review. Will she and Vigeland issue a correction?
Read 17 tweets
Jul 19
Pennsylvania Psychological Association forbids any mention on its professional listserv of Britain's Cass Review about pediatric gender medicine, points to @WPATH guidelines instead
This despite the fact that the Cass Review deemed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines on pediatric gender-transition treatment weren't scientifically rigorous.

In a recent email to over 1,000 members of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Psychological Association @APA, the PPA’s leadership denounced Britain’s Cass Review, which found that pediatric gender-transition treatment is based on "remarkably weak evidence," as "failing to meet the professional standard" of the PPA's adherence to "evidence-based practices." Accordingly, the PPA forbade any further mention of the Cass Review on the listserv.

The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, despite being adamant that it was being transparent with its members about the reason for forbidding discussion of the Cass Review, did not specify in its email why it believed that the review did not meet the group's evidence-based standards. Instead, in explaining its new policy, the PPA said that members of the LGBTQIA+ community on the listserv and their allies felt "targeted, harmed, and hurt" by the sharing of the Cass Review.

As an alternative, the PPA recommended that members reference WPATH's Standards of Care 8 and the APA's policy statement on gender-affirming care. This came after the Cass Review found that the WPATH's guidelines “lack developmental rigor” and that the document “overstates the strength of the evidence.”

The University of York systematic literature reviews (there were two parts) that concerned global guidelines on pediatric gender-transition treatment found that WPATH's guidelines were flawed due to engaging in what Cass subsequently characterized as "circularity" in their citations with other guidelines. This practice is more pejoratively known as "citation washing," in which the scientific buck essentially stops nowhere—there is no original study that solidly backs a particular claim.

The University of York team deemed that the APA's 2015 policy statement on gender-affirming care for children (which has since been updated) had poor rigor of development.

This move by the PPA to forbid discussion of the Cass Review directly follows the unsealing of internal WPATH communications in an Alabama court case regarding the development of the Standards of Care 8 that showed that some of WPATH’s own members knew that their guidelines were based on weak evidence. One WPATH leader stated in an email to colleagues that “we are painfully aware of the gaps in the literature and the kinds of research that are needed to support our recommendations.”

Additionally, the unsealed communications revealed that WPATH suppressed systematic literature reviews it commissioned from evidence-based medicine experts at Johns Hopkins University about the treatment of gender dysphoria when the findings did not support WPATH's goals. WPATH also capitulated to outside pressure to remove age restrictions on pediatric gender-transition treatment and surgeries from the Biden administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Trevor Project.

The email to PPA members was signed by Allyson L. Galloway, president, Meghan Prato, communications board chair, and Michelle Wonders, EMCC chair.Image
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Pennsylvania Psychological Association forbids any mention on its professional listserv of Britain's Cass Review about pediatric gender medicine, points to WPATH guidelines instead
benryan.substack.com/p/pennsylvania…Image
Here is what Cass had to say about the WPATH guidelines: Image
Read 6 tweets
Jul 16
I have stated repeatedly that the Cass Review made clear that there is not enough follow-up data about the GIDS clinic or any other pediatric gender-transition cohort to determine the detransition rate. The claim that the Cass Review showed a 1% detransition rate is *false*, because Appendix 8, from which people have drawn conclusions about the supposed detransition rate, only had discharge data on GIDS patients. This meant they had no data past age 18 (nor data on anyone still at GIDS for that matter). And as various experts told Cass, detransitioning can take 5 to 10 years after someone starts cross-sex hormones. There would need to be data about the GIDS patients stretching well into their 20s to properly assess detransitioning. But the adult NHS gender clinics refused to share their data on former GIDS patients with Cass.
One of the reasons why Cass came up short on actually documenting the impacts of GIDS's care of gender dysphoric youth is because:
a) GIDS kept hardly any data on its patients, a fact that lead to shocked gasps in the courtroom during the Bell v Tavistock case.
b) The adult NHS gender clinics refused to share data on former GIDS patients with Cass.

Absent such vitally needed data, Cass could only conclude that the evidence was too weak to proceed with prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones outside of a clinical trial.

And that is what the NHS is moving toward doing. The big question is whether an ethics board will approve any clinical trial. What is clear is that such a trial will not launch until early 2025 at the earliest.
Cass said: Image
Read 6 tweets

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