In 2020, a “study” went viral that purported black babies in the United States were more likely to die during birth when cared for by white doctors, but that their survival rate post-birth rose dramatically when looked after by physicians of their own race.
In August of that year, even as Black Lives Matter riots still raged across much of the U.S. as race-baiting politicians stoked the fires of division and hatred, CNN published a report suggesting that callous white doctors we’re responsible for black children dying in droves thanks to some race-based disparity in their medical care.
“The mortality rate of Black newborns in hospital shrunk by between 39% and 58% when Black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research, which laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person’s life,” CNN reported at the time, adding that “By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor’s race.”
The report was based on a study by George Mason University, where researchers crunched the data on some 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015, claiming that based on the numbers, black infants were three times more likely to die during and after birth when cared for by white doctors than by black ones. Those findings were then published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), and immediately picked up by news outlets across the country to suggest black babies were being shamelessly neglected and even killed thanks to racist white obstetricians.
That claim quickly became a rallying cry among stokers of racial division, and was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the majority of the Court ruled that race-based affirmative action practices in universities were unconstitutional.
“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live,” read an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges regarding the case. “Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment.”
Related: Jasmine Crockett Compares Black Rep. to a Slave For Marrying a White Woman
To the race-baiters, the claim that black babies were dying at the hands of white doctors who didn't care if minority children make it out of the labor & delivery unit was just too good.
Except it also wasn't true.
In a updated study that never had a prayer of being championed as loudly as the original lie, a re-analysis of the data shows that when adjusted for other relevant factors, the race of the doctor overseeing a child’s birth had an “insignificant” effect on a black baby’s survivability compared to a white baby.
The new study, conducted by two Harvard researchers at the Institute for Family Studies, found that the original 2020 study “did not control for the impact of very low birth weights (i.e., under 1,500 g) on newborn mortality.”
“Although these types of births are rare, they occur more frequently in the Black population, and they account for a very high fraction of mortality,” the Harvard team found.
“It turns out that a disproportionately large number of Black newborns with very low birth weights are attended by White physicians. We show that once we control for the impact of very low birth weights on mortality, the estimate of the racial concordance effect is substantially weakened and becomes statistically insignificant in models that account for other factors that determine newborn mortality. In other words, the newborns attended by White and Black physicians are not random samples. Black newborns with a very low birth weight are disproportionately more likely to be attended by White doctors than by Black doctors. Those newborns are also more likely to have a low chance of survival.”
Which is a pretty relevant detail that could easily be overlooked by someone who, say, is out to link evil white men with suffering among the black community. Which, according to the original research author's own admission, seems to be exactly what happened.
According to the Daily Caller Foundation, a note written in the margin of the original George Mason study by lead author Brad N. Greenwood shows he knowingly omitted his own study's findings that white children were less likely to die under the care of white doctors than black ones because it "undermines the narrative" of focusing solely on the mortality of black children.
“White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than a white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance,” an unpublished draft of the study reads, suggesting that the survival rate of white babies could be just impacted by their having a black physician as the other way around.
However, that took the focus off the specific racial angle Greenwood apparently wanted.
“I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative,” Greenwood penned, per the DCNF.
Greenwood also wrote in a 2019 email to his colleagues that he had caught and fixed a "coding" error in his research, writing: “Good news – I caught my obligatory coding error, updated results are attached. Bad news- results are not as strong. We lose the effect when a physician fixed effect is included for newborns." The ranking of what should be empirical findings as either "good" or "bad news" suggests Greenwood had a prefixed outcome in mind for the study, and wasn't happy when the data didn't support it.
While none of this proves Greenwood intentionally overlooked other relevant factors like low birth weight on infant mortality rates, it does suggest he'd have been more than willing to, if his "narrative" was at stake.
Even still, the lie persists among racism town criers who continue to push the now-debunked myth that the U.S. medical system is systematically racist against black Americans.
Which, given that the Harvard analysis was published in September of last year and is just now making the rounds on social media six-plus months later, proves just how insidious those lies can be, and how engrained in the social consciousness they can become.
Especially when keeping the fires of racism burning is the entire point.