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Soros Funded Lancet Excessive Death Number Study
surprise, surprise! Or not? Every one of the useful idiots on his payroll should be noted and blacklisted
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.
who?
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.
whores in academia? Who'da thunk it?
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.
and who was responsible? Name names, dammit
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.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros’s sponsorship.
Nonsense. All funding sources are supposed to be revealed in each and every article in a medical journal. I routinely list every source, and no paper I submit to a reputable journal could be published without such a listing.

Further, many journals maintain 'blacklists' of certain funding sources. As one example, many medical journals (including a couple that I routinely submit to) will refuse to review/publish any manuscript that has been funded in whole or in part by the tobacco industry. I have to certify that I've not received any tobacco money, and lying about this would cause the journal to retract my work (however valid it might appear to be) and then contact my Dean. I can promise you I wouldn't do well in any such review.

So this statement that the Lancet "didn't break any rules" is utter nonsense.

Posted by: Frank G 2008-01-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=218911