Discredited Lancet Study On Civilian Casualties In Iraq Was Funded By George Soros
A rather pathetic and ignominious end to an absolute train-wreck of a study for one of the world’s oldest peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.
New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Obviously Soros’ involvement here, though suspicious and troubling in that it wasn’t disclosed up front, doesn’t by itself invalidate Lancet’s conclusions. Similar studies proving that Lancet’s conclusions were way out of bounds, and that the methodologies used to reach them weren’t adequate, are what invalidates them.
That Soros was involved indicates that Lancet got to those inaccurate conclusions not through mere innocent incompetence - which would be bad enough - but rather because of a political agenda. Which makes the whole thing worse.
Better to be incompetent than dishonest political hacks masquerading as objective researchers.













