Four Years Ago, a Study Said White Doctors Were Effectively Killing Black Babies. The Study Was Wrong.
Andrea Widburg, American Thinker, September 18, 2024
In America, an inordinate number of so-called “scientific” studies are subject to what’s called the “replication (or reproducibility) crisis.” If someone publishes a study that feeds into leftist shibboleths, no matter how poorly done the study is (small sampling, foolish assumptions, bad math, etc.), the results are widely trumpeted and become embedded in the popular consciousness. That the study cannot be replicated (run again from scratch) or reproduced (subject to a new analysis of the study’s data)—and often nobody even tries to do these things—is irrelevant. The narrative overrides the scientific method.
A classic example of the scientific lie getting halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on was a 2020 study claiming that black babies were much more likely to die under a white doctor’s care. The study’s results were understood to mean that the white doctors were so racist that they were killing babies. However, that study recently got the rigorous analysis it deserved, revealing that it was completely wrong. By then, though, it was already part of the popular racial consciousness.
The worst area for the crisis is in the faux science area of psychology, where “science” often boils down to biased observation. However, the purportedly hard science of medicine isn’t much better.
With that background, here are the tweets, which I’ve run through the Thread Reader for easier viewing (including removing duplicate images):
1) Remember when the neo-segregationist left told you that white doctors were killing black babies?
Turns out they were either incapable of analyzing their own data or outright lying to you.
A new study demolishes the failings and falsehoods in that first study. We unpack it: 🧵
2) The original study claimed black newborns had lower mortality rates when cared for by black physicians. This got a lot of attention and influenced legal discourse, despite its, ahem, limitations. Classic 2020: it was as if they wanted you to think black people and white people couldn’t live together.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117
3) The study was so influential it was even cited (with clumsy inaccuracies) by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, demonstrating how far-reaching its conclusions became.
https://archive.is/iWTz1#selection-457.1-457.24
4) A new analysis of the “white doctors kill black babies” study points out a crucial omitted factor: very low birth weight (< 1500g) of the neonates in question. This led to a major misinterpretation/misrepresentation of what the data actually say.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409264121
5) Very low birth weight, more common in black newborns (3.3%) than white (1.2%), accounts for 81% of black neonatal deaths and 66% of white. Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) this critical factor wasn’t accounted for in the original analysis.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409264121
6) When the new researchers, G. Borjas and @RAVerBruggen, included very low birth weight, the apparent benefit of racial concordance became statistically insignificant. This suggests birth weight, not physician race, may be the more influential factor in newborn survival rates.
7) The new study also found that white doctors were more likely to care for black newborns with very low birth weights: 3.4% of their black patients vs 1.4% for black doctors. This important distribution wasn’t considered, for inexplicable reasons, in the original study.
8) By omitting to mention this disparity, the initial research incorrectly attributed higher mortality rates to lack of “racial concordance” between baby and doctor, rather than to increased incidence of very low birth weight cases among the black patients of white doctors.
9) Borjas and VerBruggen conclude that reducing very low birth weights among black newborns may be more crucial in narrowing the black-white infant mortality gap than focusing on physician-patient racial matching, a dramatically different prescription from the original study.
10) The new study underscores the importance of controlling for all relevant factors in medical studies (who woulda thought?), esp. when findings can influence policies and public perceptions of the very possibility of a multiracial society. Sloppy/misleading analyses can lead to dangerous and racially inflammatory conclusions about healthcare disparities.
Read the new study here:
Just because leftists say it’s a scientific study, that doesn’t mean it is. The funding goes to people who come out with results that advance the goals of pharmaceutical manufacturers and political activists. As the Free Black Thought warns, we owe it to ourselves and to society as a whole not to accept any study at face value unless we have an assurance that it’s passed replication and, if at all possible, reproducibility.
