El-Sayed Blamed Post-9/11 ‘Discrimination and Marginalization’ for Muslim Moms Having Premature Babies: He Ignored His Own Scientific Study That Proved It False
El-Sayed’s article for CNN was directly contradicted by peer-reviewed research he’d done just four years earlier
Abdul El-Sayed (Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
Chuck Ross
July 15, 2026
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), in a CNN essay that called Muslims "another victim of 9/11," claimed that anti-Muslim discrimination after September 11 led to premature babies and low birthweight among Muslim newborns in the United States. But El-Sayed didn't mention in his essay that he himself had published research four years earlier that found no such effect.
In a piece marking the anniversary of the September 11 attacks—published on the CNN web page of Fareed Zakaria—El-Sayed argued that the "discrimination and marginalization" that American Muslims and Arabs faced after the attacks produced measurable health consequences.
"We regularly see the toll this climate of discrimination takes upon these communities," wrote El-Sayed, an epidemiologist at Columbia University at the time.
As evidence, he pointed to a 2006 study published in Demography, which concluded that Arab American women in California were 34 percent more likely to have premature and low birth weight babies following the terrorist attacks. The study's author argued that "ethnicity-related stress or discrimination" likely contributed to the change. El-Sayed also cited his own 2011 study in the CNN essay that found Arab Americans had lower life expectancy rates than whites.
But El-Sayed's essay omitted another study—one he coauthored in 2008 while at Columbia—that contradicted the California findings.
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/el-sayed-blamed-post-9-11-discrimination-and-marginalization-for-muslim-moms-having-premature-babies-he-ignored-his-own-scientific-study-that-proved-it-false/
