A study that falsely claimed black newborn babies “perform better when cared for by black doctors has been cited nearly 800 times in medical literature,” reports The College Fix.
It cites a review by medical reform group Do No Harm. It examined a frequently cited study, “Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results have been “called into question since the researchers did not control for birth weight,” Do No Harm found “it has still been cited at least 786 times” in medical journals and literature.
The study also attracted attention when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson misquoted the study in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court case which found that Harvard’s race-based admissions policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The College Fix notes that “proponents of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives have cited this study to argue for privileging racial minorities for medical school. Do No Harm has previously released a different report debunking racial concordance.”
Do No Harm’s chairman, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, notes that the study was deeply harmful, because doctors tend to “follow the medical literature to understand the latest treatments” and keep up with evolving medical knowledge. “When we have flawed studies,” that “can undermine the entire medical establishment,” says Goldfarb, a nephrologist and former administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.
Goldfarb says that to prevent similar flawed studies from influencing doctors in the future, doctors need to be “properly trained in the evaluation of the medical literature,” and should be encouraged “to speak out once such flawed information is presented.”
He says the media should not gullibly swallow such studies, but rather “seek out Independent experts to review the information and to comment on it rather than to seek to maintain a particular narrative” to ensure accuracy.
Rachel Hardeman, a co-author of the paper, “is an advocate for using critical race theory in medicine but recently left the University of Minnesota following pushback against her management of an ‘antiracism’ center and allegations of plagiarism,” notes The College Fix.
Do No Harm previously obtained documents relating to this study where the lead author of the study, Brad Greenwood, “said he left out a certain data point which showed white babies did worse with black physicians because it ‘undermines the narrative.'”
The College Fix notes that
The documents found the original PNAS paper stated “[w]hite newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than an white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance.” Greenwood, the lead author of the study, wrote in the margin that he would rather “not focus” on the statistic. “If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants” he wrote, “this undermines the narrative[.]”
Experts from the Manhattan Institute and Harvard University also challenged the claims of the study and pointed out the researchers did not control for birth weight.
Researchers George Borjas, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Robert VerBruggen, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, replicated the research while accounting for birth weight. Their paper, “Physician-patient racial concordance and newborn mortality,” published by PNAS in September 2024, found that “[t]he estimated racial concordance effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant.”
The study was cited and misconstrued by Justice Jackson in her dissent joined by two other progressive supreme court justices. Her dissent featured an obviously false statistic about the death rates of black babies. The statistic was mathematically almost impossible, and had been debunked months before by people like Ted Frank, a member of the Supreme Court bar.
As the Daily Signal explains:
In her dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences in university admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson managed to pull off a trifecta: She was factually incorrect in describing the results of a study that should not be believed, which wouldn’t provide practical support for her argument even if it were accurate and credible.
Jackson claimed that racial preferences were essential in admission to medical schools because more black doctors were needed to improve health outcomes for black patients.
Specifically, she wrote, “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” That claim was taken from an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which in turn was referencing a study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
First, the study does not claim to find a doubling in survival rates for black newborns who have a black attending doctor. Instead, in its most fully specified model, it reports that 99.6839% of black babies born with a black attending physician survived compared with 99.5549% of black babies born with white attending physicians, a difference of 0.129%.
The survival rate of 99.6839% is not double 99.5549%.
The claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians is just plain false. The fact that neither the Association of American Medical Colleges nor Jackson’s clerks could read and properly understand a medical study is an alarming indication for the current state of both medical and legal education.
Second, even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were accurately described, they should not be believed. The study’s comparison of death rates for newborns who have doctors of different races does not take into account the fact that black newborns have a greater likelihood of serious medical complications and the attending physicians assigned to treat those more challenging cases are likely to be white.
For example, the study does control for whether newborns are low weight (less than 2,500 grams), but does not control for whether they are very low weight (less than 1,500 grams). Black newborns are almost three times as likely as white newborns to weigh less than 1,500 grams.
Doctors assigned to treat very low-weight babies are more likely to be specialists, rather than regular pediatricians or family practitioners. Black doctors are significantly less likely to be found in those specialized fields.
More than 5% of pediatricians or family practice physicians are black, compared with 3.8% of neonatologists and pediatric cardiologists, and 1.8% of pediatric surgeons.
Rather than demonstrating the protective benefits of black newborns having black doctors, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study only documents that black newborns are more likely to have severe issues that increase their risk of infant mortality, and those severe cases are more likely to have white attending physicians because white doctors are more prevalent in the specialized fields that treat those complications.
The study provides no convincing evidence on whether black newborns with identical conditions would fare better, worse, or no differently with a black or white doctor.
