Standard Deviation EP3: The Weight

🚨NEW BONUS EPISODE ALERT 🚨

Episode 3 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on Out of Patents is called “The Weight”. And there’s no better name for the story it tells.

Dr. Jaime Slaughter-Acey is an epidemiologist focused on one of the most damning failures in American healthcare: the disproportionate rate at which Black women and their babies die during and after childbirth. Her work connects the dots between generational stress, systemic racism, and biology. It’s rigorous, community-based, and deeply personal.

Her NIH-funded study, LIFE-2, was designed to track how social environments leave biological marks that shape birth outcomes. The grant was approved. The work was underway. Then came the email.

No warning. No appeal. No rewrite. Just a flat-out termination.

The official explanation? The agency said her study didn’t align with their new priorities. They called it “DEI work.” That’s what they labeled a multiyear, peer-reviewed project focused on saving lives.

Oliver invited Jaime onto the show because her story captures what happens when the system makes itself immune to facts. She doesn’t just study health disparities. She lives inside the consequences.

She talks about the moment she collapsed on the floor in tears, then got up to drive her daughter to a sleepover. She talks about sketching Rodin’s Burdento process what it felt like to break a promise to the women in her study.

She doesn’t play to the crowd. She tells the truth.

And the weight of it stays with you.

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EPISODE LINK ➡️ https://www.outofpatients.com/standard-deviation-ep3-the-weight/