This story has been percolating for a while, but I waited until it hit enough MSM outlets. I questioned the "study" released just before the 2006 elections in the Lancet, the British medical journal, that claimed that more than 600,000 Iraqis had been killed since the US invasion. That is in excess of the normal death rate. I called it bull then, the National Journal just recently called it major bull. Today, the Times of London makes sure that the person paying for the fraud is exposed internationally. That fraud "John" would be George Soros. The Lancet has taken a major hit to its credibility by accepting a bought and paid for political hit job by Soros. And the "researchers" who whored for Soros should be ridiculed. They were bought cheap.
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.
The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.
His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.
Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Low rent streetwalkers have more class. MIT, Johns-Hopkins, Columbia and the Lancet all have some explaining to do. Or maybe they should publish their rate schedule. That way everyone knows how much it costs to get formerly great institutions to whore.
Apparently, $100 grand or so buys the whole house. Cheap. Whores.





Can you imagine the shrieks of unhinged rage that would be emanating from the MSM and the rest of the Far Left if Soros had done something similar in support of the Iraq War? There would be marches, demonstrations, Congressional investigations, dozens of special reports by the MSM, multi-million dollar book and movie deals, etc.
One of my friends is a London academic, who defended the Lancet study as using standard, respected methods.
He owes me several rounds at the local, now.
Gaius,
The same thing happened a few years back with an Institute of Medicine report a few years back. A handful of studies were done to estimate the incidence of iatrogenic injury and death. Based upon these studies, an estimate of up to 100,000 Americans die each year from hospital iatrogenic injury. The CDC’s own numbers were in the 2000 or so deaths per year from all iatrogenic injury. Given the stricter reporting required to make the CDC’s Vital Statistics numbers, it is no surprise that there was a two order of magnitude difference. Sure the CDC numbers are probably an undercount, but the IOM numbers were still off by one order of magnitude
Let’s keep good science in mind. The funding source cannot refute the findings. We have to accept or reject the findings on the basis of the correctness of the methods, the rigor of the interviews, the accuracy of the reporting, the correctness of the calculations, etc.
In this case, I think it’s already been pretty well established that the findings were off due to methodological problems. The Soros connection raises the ugly possibility that science is being deliberately bent to serve the agenda of the far Left. This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing, and it won’t be the last.
I suppose it’s helpful to point out that the Left would be going berserk if a comparable funding connection were associated with a study whose findings were significantly lower than the Iraqi government’s findings. In fact, they have gone berserk over some oil company providing small percentages of the funding for parent organizations when a study disputes anthropogenic global climate change. The fact that Soros funded half, suggests a bought-and-paid-for study, whereas tiny “corporate social responsibility” contributions do not.
The main objection to the left’s habitual contribution-mining operation, however, is that funding doesn’t refute scientific findings; objecting to the funding source is a form of ad hominem fallacy. You have to judge the findings on their own merit. Let’s not fall into the same trap that the lefties do.
(Unrelated to this topic, please visit my political blog, “Plumb Bob Blog: Squaring the Culture,” at http://www.plumbbobblog.com. Thanks.)