Context: In 2020, a study was published showing that black babies had twice as high mortality while under the care of white doctors than black doctors. This study was incredibly influential, and Ketanji Brown Jackson even cited it in one of her Supreme Court dissents to striking down affirmative action.
However, In 2024, the study was debunked by another research paper, which showed that the original paper made a crucial mistake. And now, documents have been obtained showing that 2020 paper's mistake was deliberate
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.
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.”
Here is the news article: https://archive.ph/rJqp2
Here is the debunking study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409264121