Is the scientific paper still a fraud?

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted many aspects of society in the United States, necessitating social isolation and the shutdown of businesses, schools, and other public entities. These disruptions, combined with COVID-19 itself, not only negatively impacted the U.S. population’s physical and mental health, but also reduced access to many social services. People with opioid use disorder (OUD) were particularly vulnerable to disruptions in access to addiction treatment and social support during the COVID-19 pandemic. While emergency department (ED) visits decreased overall during the peak of the pandemic, there was an increase in opioid overdose-related visits., Several factors likely contributed to this trend, including reduced access to in-person addiction services, heightened pandemic-related stressors (eg, social isolation, financial instability), and worsening mental health leading to increased substance use. These disruptions spurred innovative strategies to expand treatment access, including removal of prescribing restrictions and rapid expansion of telehealth-based addiction care. Around the same time, EDs—recognized as the safety net for patients without access to outpatient care—saw increased efforts to initiate medications for OUD (MOUD), such as methadone and buprenorphine. While trends in opioid overdose-related ED visits before and during the COVID-19 pandemic are well described, less is known about post-pandemic changes in overdose-related ED visits and corresponding MOUD treatment rates following these policy and practice changes. Understanding how opioid overdose-related ED visits and ED-based MOUD treatment have changed after the pandemic can offer valuable insights into the impact and sustainability of OUD treatment strategies, while also helping to identify persistent gaps in care that require targeted intervention. We sought to examine trends in opioid overdose-related ED visits and EDbased MOUD treatment around the first COVID19 peak. Prior studies have demonstrated substantial pandemic-associated declines in ED presentations for time-sensitive emergencies, including acute myocardial infarction, suggesting that utilization changes were diagnosis-specific. We used appendicitis as a comparator condition, as several U.S. studies found stable presentation volumes during the peri-pandemic period.,