Press Release

Do No Harm Publishes New Report Exposing How a Debunked Racial Concordance Study Infiltrated Medicine  

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • May 14, 2025

RICHMOND, VA; May 14, 2025 – Today, Do No Harm published a new report exposing how a flawed study pushing racial concordance spread across medicine. In the report, Anatomy of a Myth: How a Debunked Racial Concordance Study Infiltrated Every Corner of the Medical Field, Do No Harm analyzes how the debunked Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study titled “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns,” was used by media outlets, academics, and medical associations to justify racially discriminatory programs. 

“Racial concordance is a pernicious, dangerous ideology wholly unsupported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Chairman of Do No Harm. “Debunking the flawed studies used to justify discriminatory initiatives, such as this study from PNAS, is essential to Do No Harm’s mission. Medical professionals, organizations, and policymakers must engage in more skepticism of any politically motivated research used to call for racially discriminatory policies. Racial concordance has no place in medicine.” 

More from the report:

  • The PNAS study claimed that survival rate of black infants improves when treated by black physicians. However, researchers failed to control for the effect of very low birth weight on infant mortality. 
  • When researchers at the Manhattan Institute attempted to replicate the study with the same data, while applying a control for very low birth weight, they found the racial concordance effect disappeared. 
  • In academia, the PNAS study has been cited 786 times, including 64 citations in 2025. 
  • Medical associations and adjacent organizations reference the PNAS study extensively, including the Association of American Medical Colleges in an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court.  
  • News outlets, including CNN, NPR, USA Today, and Science News, spread the study’s findings.  

Click here to read the full report. 

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. With 17,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 14 countries, DNH has achieved over 10,000 media hits in top-tier publications and garnered widespread attention through numerous broadcast news appearances.