‘Antiracism’ is Coming for Medical Science
Within the world of statistics and reporting, it has become fashionable to attribute any and all disparities and inequities to discrimination. This is often either grossly exaggerated or, in some cases, simply not true. With the selective omission of facts, studies — motivated by confirmation bias — are often rationalized, post hoc, into an urgent issue that requires societal change.
In 2020, for instance, a widely reported study asserted that receiving medical care from white physicians was associated with a higher death rate among black infants. The startling conclusion emerged from the peer-reviewed study, which examined 1.8 million births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 and was published in the distinguished journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Black babies cared for by white physicians were twice as likely to die. Left-of-center media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post published a plethora of commentary in response to the revelation. Its impact proved highly emotive and led U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to assert that having a black pediatrician doubles the chances of survival for black babies.
Robert VerBruggen and Harvard economist George J. Borjas co-authored a new study that refuted this widely held belief. Despite examining the same data, the two arrived at different conclusions.
It appears that an important variable — low birth weights — was overlooked by the researchers in the initial study. Being severely underweight at birth is a strong indicator of infant mortality. Compared to white women, black women are twice as likely to give birth to a baby that is underweight. Furthermore, the researchers failed to mention that treating underweight babies of all races is standard medical practice for white physicians. It is inevitable that doctors who treat the most serious medical conditions will experience a much higher death rate than the average.
Why has it taken nearly five years to debunk something that, let’s face it, a first-year statistics student could easily find out? Progressive racial ideology has become ingrained in the medical field in post–George Floyd America. A seemingly unquestionable premise — that systemic racism is to blame for racial disparities in health outcomes — is tearing apart medical research, training, and patient care. Critical Race Theory is taught in more than half of the top 100 medical schools in the United States.
The world of medical literature paints a similar picture. It seems commonplace in medical journals to attribute health disparities to racism. Articles like the “Pathology of Racism” and “How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities” are routinely published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has since been ideologically captured.
As with all things progressive, it eventually became a part of culture, where it is dutifully amplified — or, in this case, perhaps satirized. In a particularly strange episode of NBC’s medical drama New Amsterdam, a doctor finds that “internalized racism” is the cause of a patient’s tumor.
George Floyd’s murder acted as a catalyst for a racial reckoning. The first American jurisdiction to declare racism a public health crisis was Milwaukee County. Its employees receive training on how to attain racial equity in the workplace through a mandatory, 90-hour racial equity ambassador program run by the Office of Equity. A precedent was set by the decision, and hundreds of declarations followed.
Forty-two states had passed 265 declarations designating racism as a public health crisis as of September 2024. Governmental institutions and private organizations, including school boards, city councils, and county boards and, in this instance, public health departments, adopted these declarations. Attempts are being made to implement it at the national level. In March, a bill introduced by Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and cosponsored by ten Democrats was introduced to the Senate declaring racism to be, you guessed it, a public health crisis.
It raises the question of whether or not we should believe academics who are motivated by political expediency. The only “implicit bias” I can see is coming from the original study’s creators. How many more peer-reviewed studies that purport to expose the harmful effects of systemic racism have been tainted by what Thomas Sowell calls the invincible fallacy?
In addition to raising ethical concerns about questionable academic research, proponents of the systemic racism hypothesis are gambling with patients’ lives. They are sacrificing professional standards for political activism; replacing classroom and laboratory time with antiracism lectures.
Science lifted humanity out of the darkness and propelled us forward, allowing us to reach heights we could only have imagined. Ever since Galen discovered human anatomy by dissecting animals, medical science has contributed to the advance of civilization. Millions have been spared a lifetime of pain and saved from infectious diseases that, a century ago, would have killed half of the world’s population. However, science suffers when it gets intertwined with politics. To witness the horrific results of combining science and racial politics, one need only contemplate the atrocities of Nazi eugenics and Japan’s notorious Unit 731 under General Shirō Ishi.
Objective and value free, science is the antithesis of politics. It proceeds by what Karl Popper called falsifiability — the ability to disprove rather than confirm a theory. According to Popper, for a theory to be classified as scientific, it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false. This is how you differentiate science from non-science. The problem with critical race theory is that it is full of unfalsifiable arguments. Radical subjectivity has no place in science.
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