Kanye West on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1554
SUBJECT: HEALTH
The short answer
Kanye West claims about 210,000 Americans had died of COVID-19 by that point while roughly 1,000 Black children are aborted daily, implying more Black children have died from abortion than Americans from COVID since February. The roughly 210,000 cumulative US COVID-19 death figure is in the right range for around the time this episode was recorded: the US crossed 200,000 reported COVID-19 deaths around September 22, 2020, and reached about 210,000 in the first half of October 2020, close to this episode's October 1, 2020 release date.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
There's the last figure I saw was there were 210000 deaths due to covid in America and everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on. One thousand black children aborted a day, daily, we are in genocide. So more black children have died, in the past, since February, than people have died of covid and everyone wears a mask.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The roughly 210,000 cumulative US COVID-19 death figure is in the right range for around the time this episode was recorded: the US crossed 200,000 reported COVID-19 deaths around September 22, 2020, and reached about 210,000 in the first half of October 2020, close to this episode's October 1, 2020 release date. The claim that roughly 1,000 Black children are aborted per day is harder to verify against CDC's own numbers. CDC's most recent Abortion Surveillance report available at the time (covering 2018) recorded 619,591 total abortions reported from 49 reporting areas; among the 31 areas that also reported race and ethnicity, non-Hispanic Black women accounted for 33.6% of abortions with known race (not the higher share sometimes cited) and had the highest abortion rate of any group at 21.2 per 1,000 women aged 15-44, versus 6.3 for non-Hispanic White women. Applying that 33.6% share to the 619,591 total yields an estimate of roughly 570 abortions among Black women per day nationally, in the same order of magnitude as, but meaningfully below, the 1,000-per-day figure commonly cited in this argument, which appears to derive from other estimates (such as Guttmacher Institute figures, which include additional areas CDC does not capture) or a different baseline. Beyond the numeric discrepancy, comparing a single cumulative COVID-19 death count to an extrapolated daily abortion estimate is a rhetorical framing rather than a like-for-like statistical comparison, since abortion is an elective procedure counted differently from mortality data and CDC's abortion reporting is voluntary and incomplete (several states, including California and New Hampshire, did not report data to CDC in this period). The COVID death toll component is reasonably well-supported for the episode's release date; the 1,000-per-day Black abortion figure is in the right order of magnitude but appears overstated relative to CDC's own data, and the framing implying direct comparability between the two statistics is misleading.
Evidence sources 03 / EXHIBITS
- COVID Data TrackerTier 1