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January 13, 2008

Soros Funded Lancet Election Hit Piece

By Rick Moran

Counting civilian deaths in Iraq is a ghoulish business. Given the chaos in the country for much of the last 4 years and the breakdown of government record keeping, the job has devolved into a statistical morass where competing methodologies give entirely different totals.

At the center of the controversy have been two separate studies done by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that were published in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet. The results from both studies were wildly at odds with other estimates and resulted in questions being raised about the methodology used to determine the findings.
Now we have evidence that there may indeed have been political motivations in doing the study and in reaching its controversial conclusions.

Half of the funding for the study came from the George Soros group the Open Society Institute:

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.
An anti-war researcher receiving funds from an anti-war, anti-American billionaire? And the highly respected Lancet publishing the findings anyway?

The question of motivations for doing the study in the first place have been revealed to be not in the interest of science but politics. The editor of the Lancet should be fired for besmirching the reputation of that journal and Professor Roberts should also suffer some kind of penalty for dragging the good name of Columbia University down into a political cesspool.

But neither will happen. Leftist academics are well protected and the political motivations of the editor of the Lancet will be obscured by weasel words denying any political angle to publishing the study. And George Soros will continue his anti-American activities unencumbered by any principles or morals.

At my blog, I have more on Soros as well as a review of the timing of the Lancet studies.
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