MAJOR INFANT MORTALITY STUDY WAS EDITED TO PRESERVE RACIAL PERSPECTIVE

National Review

 

Major Infant-Mortality Study Was Edited to Preserve Racial ‘Perspective’

By Abigail Anthony

April 2, 2025 1:10 PM

 

Researchers deliberately obscured a data point about white babies under the care of black physicians because it ‘undermines the narrative.’

 

When the high-profile Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case was before the Supreme Court, the Association of American Medical Colleges submitted an amicus brief citing a 2020 study and claiming that “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.” The study in question, “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns,” suggested that the mortality rates for black newborns decline significantly if they are under the care of black physicians, an outcome possibly driven by white physicians harboring “spontaneous bias.” The study stated, “Black physicians systemically outperform their colleagues when caring for Black newborns,” and the research “gives warrant for hospitals and other care organizations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism.” In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited that brief and claimed the following: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

 

The problem? The study was totally wrong. Worse, documents recently obtained by FOIA requests show that the researchers deliberately omitted a data point about white babies under the care of black physicians because it “undermines the narrative.”

 

In 2024, two researchers — one at Harvard University, another at the Manhattan Institute — noted that accounting for a “crucial omitted variable,” namely very low infant weight, completely invalidates the previous finding: “This paper shows that the influential estimates of the impact of racial concordance on Black newborn mortality are substantially weakened and often become both numerically close to zero and statistically insignificant, once the analysis controls for the mortality effect of very low birth weights.” Why? The black babies with a very low birth weight are disproportionately more likely to be seen by a white doctor, and those babies are more likely to have a vulnerability closely linked to mortality. Contrary to the previous study’s argument, the disparities couldn’t be simply explained by the physician’s race. Ultimately, the 2024 analysis showed that black physicians were not outperforming their white colleagues. Moreover, there wasn’t evidence to brand white physicians as racist. Whoops!

 

More recently, the nonprofit organization Do No Harm obtained documents about the study through FOIA requests. First reported by the Daily Caller, an unpublished version of the study stated the following: “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.” (If you apply the logic espoused in the published version, this might suggest that black physicians have a “spontaneous bias” against their white infant patients.) That sentence was struck out, and the study’s lead author, Brad N. Greenwood, left the following comment in the 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.” (I’d argue a better perspective is, you know, saving infants regardless of their race.) Funnily enough, the published version of the paper sets forth a different claim: “Concordance appears to bring little benefit for White newborns but more than halves the penalty experienced by Black newborns.” The stricken data point, the Daily Caller reports, appears in an appendix and not the study’s body.

 

The reality is that even bright, dedicated researchers suffer from oversights, and unintentional methodological errors can sabotage a study. But, in this particular case, the researchers deliberately obscured results that weakened their social-justice “narrative.” In Greenwood’s own words, they were “telling the story” from a particular “perspective.” Maybe it isn’t surprising that the FOIA documents revealed that the study had a progressive agenda, since one of the study’s authors, Rachel Hardeman, is the current director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, and she states on her personal website that her “goal” is to “manifest racial justice so that all people, especially Black women and girls, can live their full greatness and glory.”

 

Within the halls of academia, the peer-review process is portrayed as a rigorous intellectual sparring match that elevates publishing in a journal to a grand accomplishment, but the truth is that academics get away with murder — if they are progressive. The laughably bad standards were illustrated in 1996 when physicist Alan Sokal published a nonsensical paper that “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions,” and they’re further confirmed in the more recent “grievance studies affair” conducted by Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish the hoax articles from the earnest ones. Consider the following articles published in peer-review journals: 1) “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” 2) “The earth is a big badass butch dyke in menopause,” 3) “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea,’” and 4) “Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds.” Editors and peer-reviewers largely adjudicate whether an article arrives at a sufficiently progressive conclusion, independent of the methodology or argument structure.

 

To conservatives, the words “published study” and “expert” no longer communicate any prestige or credibility because supposed academics have a lengthy history of distorting data to promote a political conclusion that encourages their preferred policies, thereby abandoning any commitment to truth. Dubious practices have been obvious for years in the “research” on “gender-affirming care,” a set of medical interventions that amount to sexual lobotomies. In the event that the data cannot be contorted to support their left-wing agenda, the so-called scientists might just refuse to publish their findings — even if they’ve received nearly $10 million in government funding. It is only a matter of time until “peer-reviewed paper” becomes a pejorative — or perhaps that has already happened.