In 2020, researchers at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences announced a shocking discovery: Black babies are three times more likely to die when cared for by a white doctor than by a black one.

It’s terrible. It’s a scandal.

It’s also nonsense.

The study was junk science — data manipulated to produce a divisive and partisan narrative. Yet you’d think otherwise, given how the press has covered the report in the years since its publication.

And this isn't just one dishonest study. The widespread dissemination of intentional falsehoods through the media is more common than you'd think. It's enough to raise all the obvious questions about how much faith we should put in “settled science.”

“A September 2024 replication effort concluded that the original study authors did not statistically control for very low birth weight newborns at the highest risk of dying,” reported the Daily Caller’s Emily Kopp. "Applying that control zeroed out any statistically significant effect of racial concordance on infant mortality. Now, evidence has emerged that the paper’s lead author buried information in order to tell a tidier story than the one his methods and data originally illustrated.”

In other words, the reduplication effort revealed that the study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had failed to control for very low birth weight, a critical predictor of infant mortality. Since white doctors are significantly more likely to care for low birth-weight infants — those at greatest risk of death — they were thus carelessly associated with the mortality rates. This is why the........

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