Life expectancy data ‘vindicates’ my race report, says author

THE embattled author of a government report on health outcomes has declared himself vindicated after a BMJ article confirmed that white people have lower life expectancy.

Dr Tony Sewell, the chairman of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, was heavily criticised in the leading journal after his report last March concluded that pre-pandemic health outcomes of ethnic minorities were better than those of Caucasians.

He said he and his fellow commissioners faced “abuse” for their conclusions on health and race, even though they were subsequently echoed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, the BMJ has now published an analysis of the official data that confirms that between 2012 and 2019 “the white ethnic group had lower life expectancy and higher overall mortality than all ethnic minority groups except the mixed group”.

It continued: “For individual causes of death, the picture was more varied, with ethnic minority groups generally having lower mortality than the white group for half of the 30 leading causes of death (responsible for about 80 per cent of all deaths).

The BMJ analysis pointed to “the healthy migrant effect” and lower rates of tobacco and alcohol use as potential explanations. It also said that the overall “mortality advantage” of some ethnic groups, namely Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Caribbean males, had been reversed due to their higher risk of death from Covid-19.

This, it said, was likely to be because they tended to live in densely populated urban areas, in large, multigenerational households, and work in public-facing roles, such as health and social care.

Dr Sewell told The Daily Telegraph that his team knew their findings would be backed up by the ONS when it published its report.

“Essentially what happened was people didn’t look at the data,” he said.

“What they were driven by was a bit of hysteria around the Covid results.

“Once we inspected the data we could see the situation was complex.

“We are not denying racism is a factor but we are looking at race disparities and some people didn’t realise white people could fare worse. Making that statement seemed to worry people.

“People wanted us to say something along the lines that black people’s health outcomes were worse than whites – but that wasn’t true. We had to go on what we saw and the data in front of us.”

The wider report into racism in Britain caused a furore after it found no evidence of institutional racism. And after it recommended that the UK should act as a model for other white-majority countries, UN experts said the report could “fuel racism”. An article in the BMJ then accused the Governmentappointed commission of “cherrypicking” the evidence.

Dr Sewell said: “I feel very vindicated by this and if people had bothered to read our report rather than listening to the news they would have seen we were telling the truth.”

“The BMJ and the Guardian were seemingly undermining what we were reporting rather than looking at the facts.

“We definitely didn’t see any institutional racism. What we did see in health, in particular, is a situation that was more complex than just calling it institutional racism.”

‘The BMJ and the Guardian undermined what we were reporting rather than looking at the facts’