Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Lancing the Lies at the Lancet
(see web page for links and art)
Lancing the Lies at The Lancet
23 Adar 5767, 13 March 07 09:48by "Back to Sanity" - Arutz 7
Analysts(IsraelNN.com) The Lancet is a British medical journal, considered
the leading such journal in Britain. Unfortunately, instead of pursuing
serious research in medicine, in recent years the Lancet has become one of
the main organs of anti-Israel and anti-American leftism in the UK. Dr
Richard Horton, editor of the The Lancet, is a leftist moonbat. Some other
British medical journals are little better.
The Lancet has run at least 130 articles bewailing the health conditions
of the poor Palestinians, yet never has denounced Palestinian terrorism as
being the cause of those woes. It regularly denounces Israel for checking
Palestinian ambulances, naturally never mentioning how often those
ambulances carry bombs and murderers. CAMERA has exposed the anti-Israel
bias prevalent in The Lancet. It regularly makes moral equivalence
judgments about Palestinian mass murder of Jews and Israel defending its
civilians. It falsely claims that Israel intentionally targets "innocent
civilians" and makes countless political assertions that have nothing to
do with health. The Israel Hasbara Committee has also attacked bias in
The Lancet and other British medicial journals.
Perhaps the most outrageous example of the Lancet junking its scholarly
standards and research agenda in the name of promoting politically correct
wackiness was its decision to publish an article claiming that 650,000
Iraqis, or 2.5% of the entire Iraqi population, died as a result of the
US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. That
article was "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional
cluster sample survey", by Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. The
Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9545, 21 October 2006, Pages 1421-1428. It
immediately drew enormous criticism and was denounced as fraud and
quackery all over the globe. The 650,000 number was pure "advocacy
statistics", meaning advocacy lying with fraudulent statistics. Such
advocacy statistic lies are familiar, from the 10% of the population being
gay to the 600 billion Africans who died in the slave trade.
Even leftist antiwar activist grouns, like "Iraqi Body Count", put the
real number of dead Iraqis as no more than 50,000. Others have also come
up with estimates nowhere near that in The Lancet, and some put them below
20,000. Michael Fumento, the leading science journalist in teh US,
dismissed The Lancet piece as naked propaganda. And naturally, The Lancet
had no interest in the number of Iraqi lives that the war SAVED! I
counted 138,000 web pages that refer to fraud in The Lancet's article on
Iraq. Now even the distinguished Times of London has joined the fray and
denounced The Lancet's fraudulent claims. While the entire article is
worth reading, here are some of the best points:
'Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was
conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed
satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned
e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh
doubts.
'One critic is Professor Michael Spagat, an economist from Royal Holloway
College, University of London...
'Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of
mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph,
the use of the word .casualties. to mean deaths rather than deaths plus
injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen...
'.The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate
supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,. contends Professor
Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. .They published a
sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but
respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the
procedures that they stated.. The paper had .no scientific standing.. Did
he rule out the possibility of fraud? .No..
2. The climate change truth-deniers ...
by Melanie Phillips
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1468
