In 2020, researchers at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences announced a shocking discovery: Black babies are three times more likely to die when cared for by a white doctor than by a black one.
It’s terrible. It’s a scandal.
It’s also nonsense.
The study was junk science — data manipulated to produce a divisive and partisan narrative. Yet you’d think otherwise, given how the press has covered the report in the years since its publication.
And this isn't just one dishonest study. The widespread dissemination of intentional falsehoods through the media is more common than you'd think. It's enough to raise all the obvious questions about how much faith we should put in “settled science.”
“A September 2024 replication effort concluded that the original study authors did not statistically control for very low birth weight newborns at the highest risk of dying,” reported the Daily Caller’s Emily Kopp. "Applying that control zeroed out any statistically significant effect of racial concordance on infant mortality. Now, evidence has emerged that the paper’s lead author buried information in order to tell a tidier story than the one his methods and data originally illustrated.”
In other words, the reduplication effort revealed that the study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had failed to control for very low birth weight, a critical predictor of infant mortality. Since white doctors are significantly more likely to care for low birth-weight infants — those at greatest risk of death — they were thus carelessly associated with the mortality rates. This is why the replication, when very low birth weight was accounted for, found no significant racial divergence in the data.
Thus, a false narrative of racist white doctors causing infant deaths had been allowed to spread widely.
“Black newborn babies in the US are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by black doctors, but three times more likely to die when looked after by white doctors, a study finds,” CNN reported in 2020.
Declared National Public Radio, “A key to black infant survival? Black doctors.”
“Black babies are more likely to survive when cared for by Black doctors, study finds,” reported USA Today.
And so on.
It gets worse, because the records also suggest the researchers also intentionally concealed data that might have distracted from the preferred narrative. Kopp, citing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, noted an initial version of the study had included this line: “White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a Black physician than a white physician, implying a 22 percent fatality reduction from racial concordance.” Lead author Brad Greenwood, displeased with this finding, noted in the draft's margin: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants, this undermines the narrative.”
Even more distressing than this study’s journey from junk to accepted narrative is that this incident is not isolated. This type of thing is so common, and it’s so easy for bogus “science” to find a foothold in our newsrooms that a journalist once tricked editors worldwide with a fake study just to make ...
