The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has warned the government that the release of the controversial race report which it downplayed the realities of structural racism in the UK is “a missed opportunity.”

The BMJ’s response comes only days after campaigners and community leaders have criticised the government for “gaslighting” the lived experiences of ethnic minorities in Britain.

Mohammad S Razai, Academic Clinical Fellow at St George’s University of London, Azeem Majeed, Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London and Aneez Esmail, Health Services Research & Primary Care at the University of Manchester, all provided analysis to the report, titled Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.

It dedicated 30-pages to examining race disparities in health and claimed that “for many key health outcomes including life expectancy and overall mortality… ethnic minority groups have better outcomes than the White population.”

It also stated that “genetic risk factors,” in addition to “cultural” and “behavioural” factors have led to the stark disproportion rates of infection among minority ethnic communities throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Denouncing the government’s findings, the BMJ said that the existence of structural racism will not come as a surprise for those that have looked at evidence over several decades of research in the health field.

“The report’s conclusions, recommendations, and cherry-picked data to support a particular narrative shows why it should have been externally peer-reviewed by independent health experts and scientists,” they said.

“Furthermore, we would expect that a report with such lofty ambitions of presenting a ‘new race agenda’ would have at least one health expert or a biomedical scientist on the commission. It included a space scientist, a retired diplomat, a politics graduate, a TV presenter and an English literature graduate, but no one with an academic background in health inequalities.”

The BMJ also argued that report’s conclusion that deprivation, “family structures,” and geography are all key factors for health inequalities and not one’s ethnicity.

However, it ignores the overwhelming evidence that systemic racism – particularly residential segregation – is rising in the UK and a major driver of ethnic differences in socio-economic status.

The impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities have only “exposed and aggravated the structural socioeconomic disadvantages” experienced by these communities.

Most recent figures reveal that Black and South Asian men are 4.2 times and 3.6 times as likely to die from covid-19 compared to their white counterparts

The BMJ concluded in its analysis that the report “lacks the scientific credibility and authority to be used for major policy decisions. Its methodology and language, its lack of scientific expertise, and the well-known opinions of its authors make it more suitable as a political manifesto rather than an authoritative expert report. The new government approach on race, divorced from reality, fails to provide any solutions to ethnic disparities in health. Its attempts to undermine the well-established and evidence-based role of ethnicity on health outcomes will lead to a worsening of systemic inequalities putting more ethnic minority lives at risk.”