September 18, 2024 - 8:00pm

A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.

The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

How could two teams of researchers look at the same data — 1.8 million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015 — and reach diametrically opposite conclusions?

This time around, the researchers added one key variable that the 2020 researchers had overlooked — low birth weights — and the whole thing collapsed. The research design contained a fatal flaw, overlooking the fact that severely underweight babies, who have very high mortality rates to start with, tend to be treated by white doctors. Physicians who handle the most serious medical cases tend to see higher death rates.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this level of scholarly error raises serious questions about the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies published in the past five years that documented the prevalence of systemic racism in the medical profession and implicit bias among white doctors. Could the research design of those papers, some of which have been cited hundreds of times in subsequent papers, also have been flawed, so as to advance a progressive political agenda cloaked in the authority of objective science?

At the peak of the nation’s racial reckoning, between the years 2019 and 2021, the leading journals of the Anglosphere rushed to put out special issues and contrite reflections on anti-black racism and their journals’ institutional complicity in the brutal oppression of African Americans. Scientific American, Science, Nature, Health Affairs, and others assumed that systemic racism and implicit bias operate as natural laws which give researchers carte blanche to interpret all racial disparities as being governed by those laws.

Medical schools added lessons on critical race theory, intersectionality, identity, oppression, allyship, colonialism, patriarchy, fatphobia, power and privilege to their curricula, taking up time and space previously allotted to cell biology and anatomy. To date, more than 250 governmental bodies and private institutions have declared racism to be a public healthcare crisis, an escalation in urgency that morally justifies the prioritisation of non-whites for medical treatment, from Covid vaccinations to organ transplants, as a means to close the racial disparities gap in healthcare outcomes.

Much of the medical research of this period employs scientific terminology and statistical regression models, making it virtually impenetrable to a layperson, but the conclusions often don’t square with common sense. One study in Health Affairs concluded that neighbourhoods in New Orleans with high rates of police encounters experience significantly higher rates of smoking, poor physical health, low physical activity, violent crime and domestic violence — as if the police was the cause of these problems.

Media outlets owe it to the public to report on the latest study, rather than doubling down on advocacy journalism in the service of a monocausal moralistic metanarrative that may turn out to be flawed or even false.

The medical profession may be in for a reckoning of its own. Hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles are ripe for an independent review that could result in corrections or possibly retractions.


John Murawski is a journalist based in Raleigh, NC. His work has appeared in RealClearInvestigations, WSJ Pro AI and Religion News Service, among other outlets.