That Lancet study

Brian O'Connor

As with AGW, nuclear winter, DDT, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, we are once again faced with politicized science.

Subordinating proper, objective, scientific methods and controls (sensu lato) to achieve a greater political or social good will discredit science and scientists as a whole.

This has got to stop -- it benefits nobody.

Alcuin

This issue will of course be the top story on the Today Programme. NOT! But wouldn't it be nice to hear the sanctimonious Humphrys swallowing John Bolton's take on Humphrys' hero Soros. We can dream.

Reid of America

There is no such thing as a "utterly authoritative" medical journal. Medicine is too soft a science for that. JAMA, the US version of Lancet, just released a study saying that breast cancer genes are far less important than thought in contracting the disease. It was thought that gene carriers had an 80% chance of contracting cancer. Now we are told it is 40%. New research shows it is not 80% likely but 40% likely. The 80% studies were considered "utterly authoratative". I know a 35 year old woman who had the gene and had both breasts pre-emptively removed because she believed it was highly probable she would contract cancer. She believed in the authority of medical science. Mathematics will always be authoratative. All other science is fluid. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119984113759476419.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Dalmar

Ms Phillips, listen to your myopic reasoning—just because The Lancet go this ONE story wrong, you have the audacity to ask “…Who can take the Lancet seriously ever again?”—based on this one & only one story—am I missing something? Perhaps, you’ve never made a mistake in your life—not even one? I can attest to one recent story you got dead wrong—The Kenyan Jihad story—claiming Muslims were responsible for the current electoral crisis in Kenya, you were dead wrong. Do you have the guts to admit that you were wrong? No wonder you took the story down after being bombarded with overwhelming facts proving that the conflict is tribal Christian-on-Christian & that those who burnt the church & massacred the people were Christians and not Muslims...as you wanted the world to believe! To give you a dose of your own medicine then, who can take Ms Phillips seriously ever again? On a different note, from your background, you seem to be a knowledgeable person, but unfortunately the quickness with which you blame every crisis around the world on Muslims—sometimes even without thinking through the story—astounds me! Some of your claims—such as the Kenyan story—were widely exaggerated—to the point of being laughable! I honestly think that your blog suffers from a ‘group-think-mentality’—don’t you have some friends whose views you disagree to balance your stories against—before you make a fool of yourself like you did on the Kenyan story?

Barry Larking

This is quite disastrous for the reputation and standing of so distinguished a journal.

Quite apart from the falsification of the data, was it then impossible to consign the responsibility for the actual numbers who died to those responsible – jihadist Islamists?

Stuart

My favourite piece ok deliberate falsifying and skewing is the inclusion of 60 deaths due to a car bomb planted by Al Qaeda that was included ONE DAY AFTER THE DEADLINE FOR COLLECTING DATA! Ss the report says "Suspicious cluster. Lafta's team reported 24 car bomb deaths in early July, as well as one nonviolent death, in "Cluster 33" in Baghdad. The authors do not say where the cluster was, but the only major car bomb in the city during that period, according to Iraq Body Count's database, was in Sadr City. It was detonated in a marketplace on July 1, likely by Al Qaeda, and killed at least 60 people, according to press reports. The authors should not have included the July data in their report because the survey was scheduled to end on June 30, according to Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Because of the study's methodology, those 24 deaths ultimately added 48,000 to the national death toll and tripled the authors' estimate for total car bomb deaths to 76,000. That figure is 15 times the 5,046 car bomb killings that Iraq Body Count recorded up to August 2006." But you will still get the idiots who will insists on extrapolation of 650,000 to "1 million. No! Do I hear 1.2m? Any more bids ladies and gentlemen? Mr Galloway......"

Harry Templeton

Quite!

roGER

For those Spectator readers who might be a tad suspicious when Melanie mentions statistics, Tim Lambert's blog carries this piece from one of the authors of the report - he's sent it the WSJ: "Your editorial entitled, "The Lancet's political hit" regarding our study of Iraqi deaths was a unique blend of error and innuendo. For example, I was not opposed to removing Saddam; I was opposed to invading a country while the UN Secretary General was stating that it would violate the UN Charter. Your suggestion that our Iraqi colleague Riyadh Lafta was suspect because he recorded child mortality during his career is particularly ironic. He was one of few professors in the country that never joined the Baath Party. You further suggest that because some of the second round of survey funding came from the Soros Foundation (unknown to the authors until last month) the results are suspect. In my work in eight war zones over the past two decades, I have seen the Soros Foundation bring heat and water to the beleaguered people of Sarajevo, bring the internet to millions of people trapped in Eastern Europe, and help the victims of torture in Zimbabwe. Were those efforts devoid of merit? If the Wall Street Journal applied this logic to yourself and was unable to research or write on issues related to your advertising funding, your paper would become rather slim. A certain number of Iraqis died because of the invasion. We reported the death rate went up 2.5 fold, the Iraqi government now claims that it only doubled. Either way, hundreds of thousands have died and downplaying that fact is a disservice to your readers." http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/01/les_roberts_replies_to_wsj_edi.php#commentsArea

korova

Therein lies the clue: "This in a medical journal which hitherto was regarded as utterly authoritative.." Until you decided you didn't agree with it's findings. Funny that.

korova

Furthermore, you add: "The NJ authors say they have now learned that this ‘research’ was funded by George Soros, the financier who has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush." You don't seem to be too bothered about the source of funding when it concerns the 'global warming conspiracy' you are clearly obsessed with. Then you conveniently overlook the funding from ExxonMobil. Funny, eh?

Rev Goat Boy

Who can take anyone seriously who believes that the MMR jab causes Autism, that we are here due to an intelligent designer & that adding huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere will make no difference to the climate. Who are the people who won't take the Lancet seriously again? Would that be Melanie Phillips & does that matter.

Bruce Hudkins, MD

As a physician, I will never trust the Lancet again. The same sort of thing has been occuring with the New England Journal of Medicine for some years, now. I mostly read in my subspecialty at this point... Tulsa, Oklahoma

Allan

Whether is 650 or 100,000 dead its too many when war is just about the cowardly bombing of civilians. What the Lancet may or may not have done is no worse than the media and political frame up on global warming, which will never be admitted and will cause all the interested parties mainly political and pan governmental to have lots of meetings for ever and ever. Whatever happens, even if things get worse,they will claim credit(for the fact is less bad than it might have been) and continue to intervene for their own benefit in the latest in a long line of "created" scaremongering" from terrorism, to Iran and global warming to push their own elitist agendas for their own benefit.

elixelx

Hey, if George Galloway says its a million that's good enough for me although...the last time I saw him he said 1.2 million...200,000 brought back to life on George's say-so. Any chance the lancet could do the same?

Matthew

I quite agree with Melanie that science must never be the servant of politics. How ironic then that government scientists were used to justify the war in the first place.

Nicholas Storey

Do you have the actual statistics? Or even any actual proof that the statistics of the Lancet study were as bent as a planning officer's accounts? One civilian Iraqi casualty, let alone fatality, was one too many. It seems quite clear that the 'allies', almost certainly, killed more Iraqis than those killed by the Iraqi regime that the allies were bringing down: to finish Daddy Bush's business; impose an alien culture on Arab people and steal their oil.

Tony Allwright

You won't find a better review of the Lancet body-count "study" than at http://markhumphrys.com/iraq.dead.html#lancet The Lancet was almost as slovenly over publishing Wakefield's MMR canard.

Alcuin

Sir David King mentioned on the BBC Straight Talk programme that the Lancet also published two other dodgy papers: Arpad Pusztai on GM potatoes and Andrew Wakefield on the MMR vaccine. This is very poor editorship, and marks the intrusion of politics and bad judgement into what was once a highly reputable journal. That's three bad calls, from which it will find it hard to recover.

Brian O'Connor

The National Journal article found 3 areas of concern: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Of these, at least to me, numbers "1" and "2" above are substantive and troubling. Number "3" becomes interesting to me only because it might, but does not necessarily, explain "1" and "2". (George Soros and his Open Society Institute are not incorrect in every way on every issue: even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.)

To my way of thinking, the lack of transparency is hugely important. Having said that, the NJ article defends it, at least in part. ("Some of these questions could be resolved if other researchers had access to the surveyors' original field reports and response forms. The authors have released files of collated survey results but not the original survey reports, citing security concerns and the fact that some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place. This was a legitimate problem, and it underscored the difficulty of conducting research in a war zone.")

But the reasons accounting for the study's opacity, however legitimate and compelling they might be, are irrelevant. The bottom line is that in the absence of complete (or nearly complete) transparency, there is no way to validate the data and the author's analysis of it.

So you really don't want to hook your star to this study.

As an aside, according to the NJ article, the Lancet article was deliberately timed for publication for political impact (evidently, the Lancet articles authors admitted as much). That's a big red flag that speaks against the author's objectivity. A second red flag is that the number of "excess" deaths -- 601,000 -- is hugely greater than any other study reported. That doesn't mean the number is necessarily incorrect, but it should raise a healthy skepticism, especially since it's impossible to validate the data or the analyses of them.

There are other things, but I'll just leave it at this.

Reid of America

Before the war the radical left told us that the UN economic sanctions were killing 10,000 Iraqi's a month. After the US liberated Iraq the UN ended sanctions. That means US military actions have now saved over 500,000 Iraqi lives. So either the radical left admits it lied about 10,000 deaths a month or they admit the US has saved half a million poor Iraqi's.

Brian O'Connor

Nicholas Story wrote:

Do you have the actual statistics? Or even any actual proof that the statistics of the Lancet study were as bent as a planning officer's accounts?

Of course, the problem is that independent researchers evidently haven't had access to the raw data, perhaps for perfectly legitimate reasons.

On a more conceptual level, the burden of proof is on the authors of the Lancet study to make their case, not on us to falsify it. The best way for them to do so is to find a way to open their data and methods to outside scrutiny. That may be impossible, but the fact that it's impossible doesn't mean we're then required to default into taking the study at face value.

Of course, you have every right to your opinion that "one civilian Iraqi casualty" is too many (as is one death in an auto accident), that the Iraq war is all about "stealing oil" for $95 a barrel and Bush's desire to impose an "alien culture" on the pure, natural, unblemished perfection of Iraq's native ways.

I wonder parenthetically, though, why you're living in the decadent west and have not moved to, say, Riyadh, Amman, Cairo or Damascus to experience nirvana first-hand.

robzrob

Learn this. Melanie Phillips is not in the least bit interested in facts, figures, statistics, etc - not least because she doesn't understand them. When she's passed A level Maths I might start listening to her. All she wants, like journalists and editors everywhere, is a story - any story.

korova

Brian O'Connor, you wrote "the Iraq war is all about "stealing oil" for $95 a barrel". Such wit. The Iraq Oil Law and the associated PSAs that guarantee profits for foreign oil corporations has proven, without a shadow of doubt, that this was all about 'stealing' oil. To suggest otherwise suggests a child-like innocence, or a blind disregard for the facts.

Russell Seitz

"Whatever happened to peer review? Who can take [insert name of hobbyhorse ] seriously ever again?" These may be fairer questions when applied to Melanie Phillips' DYI science journalism. One need not bother asking after the reviewers who vet the Speccy's science- they are as conspicuously absent from the process as a science editor. The only peer arguably responsible for her peculiar views on climate change seems to be Christopher Monckton. It would be a relief if the editors would delegate all science writing to Nigella Lawson ,whose cuisine testifies to her enjoying a monopoly of temperature sense in her family.

Jay Crawford

I've read with intellectual and moral OUTRAGE the pathetic attempts by some readers here to defend the Lancet study. Indeed, "outrage" may be too weak a word for my reaction to their utter lack of sense. The Lancet study was done by skewed data sampling. It was, in fact, like taking a fatal traffic accident in Trafalgar Square and then multiplying that death by the size of London compared to the size of Trafalgar Square. The result would be a number so high that it would seem to be proof that Britons are homocidal maniacs with cars and, very soon, everyone in England will be dead...victims of rampaging armies of murderous motorists. Except...it's not true. And you all know it's not true because a real basis for such absurd statistics would be damage that you can see: squashed people, filled hospitals, mass graves, etc. If such statistics were true, there would be a COMPLETE breakdown of society...yet you can see that you still have a society. Therefore, you are confident that such statistical conclusions are false. For the same reason, you can be confident of the utter falsehood of the Lancet's numbers. Let's get a reference point: In World War Two, all sides engaged in "area bombing". Today, we would call it "indiscriminate" bombing but, at that time, precise aiming of bombs from high altitude was not possible. Even the Americans, who pioneered precision bombing and bombed during daylight with the most accurate bombsights available, still used masses of bombers to drop hundreds of tons of bombs to destroy important targets. (To protect its bomber crews, the R.A.F. bombed mostly at night, with even less accuracy.) In all, over a million tons of bombs were dropped "indiscriminately" on German cities and towns, killing 500,000-600,000 people. We KNOW this because the Germans kept records, often took pictures, dug mass graves, and even conducted accurate surveys. In the aftermath of the war, no one felt good about the high civilian death tolls which resulted from imprecise targetting and bombing. That bad feeling drove the public conscience away from accepting area bombing and this, along with the move to smaller "tactical" air attack doctrine, drove the developement of real precision bombing using computers and guided weapons. Even during the last American mass heavy bomber raids, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs against urban targets in North Vietnam (railroad and port facilities at Haiphong in December 1972), the communists' own propaganda claimed 5,000 civilians were killed. And THAT was at a time when the U.S.A.F. had a bomber force of over 600 aircraft (three times more than today) and when bombs, guided and unguided, were ten times less accurate than today (hence the use of hundreds of tons of bombs in 1972). Since then the Western public has become even less accepting of civilian deaths caused by errant bombs and bullets. Responding to this public feeling, Western militaries have invested more in precision attack and trained their pilots and soldiers to avoid civilian casualties. This is well-received because those same pilots and soldiers are members of Western societies and share the same horror of the slaughter of innocents. Want proof? Weapons-wise, the proof is in the almost exclusive use of guided bombs anytime a target is within a half kilometer of civilian homes; that is one example. Another example is the developement of guided munitions, costing ten times more, but with smaller warheads (to make them more useable in urban areas). If Western militaries didn't care about reducing or eliminating civilian casualties, we'd save some of our troops from danger (and a lot of taxpayer money) by using four 500lb bombs to level a block of houses; instead, our soldiers get close so as to target part of a building with a single Hellfire missile's 20lb warhead, sparing other buildings and possibly innocent people nearby. It's not perfect and sometimes innocent civilians DO get caught in the crossfire, or OUR enemies hide behind THEIR OWN civilians to sacrifice them for anti-Western propaganda. But even then, Western troops (ESPECIALLY British and American troops) try to shoot around our enemies' "human shields". NO ONE else takes that kind of care to avoid civilian casualties...especially in the Middle East (with the general exception of Israel). PERIOD. Western armies -OUR armies- COULD level whole blocks if they wanted to do so. Easy. No problem. If we really wanted to possess a country like Iraq for its resources, we could herd all the native population onto reservations, as the Americans did 130 years ago...or just exterminate them as Belgium and Germany did 100 years ago...or mix the afore-mentioned techniques in smaller quantities as Britain did 80-200 years ago. But we don't...because our concept of "morality in war" has been developing in the sixty years since Nuremburg as the information age has dawned. When we see bad acts committed (which happens ever more easily in this era of video-on-the-spot), we confront our past savagery and tame our baser impulses in the present. Not everyone does. We know about Saddam Hussein's mass killing because of the evidence: mass graves, video of the slaughter, the severely injured ("2-3 significantly wounded for every 1 killed" is the historic ratio)...not through comparitively small sample Lancet surveys. In short, where's the evidence of an Iraqi holocaust? To kill the 500,000-600,000 people (a smaller number!) in Germany, our air forces had to level, not just bomb, but LEVEL their cities. Where are Iraq's LEVELED cities? Where are the mass graves for 650,000 people? Where? Where are the 1,500,0000 wounded Iraqis choking up the hospitals? Where? And in the midst of all of this, with hundreds of video cameras used by reporters trying to make big names for themselves, thousands of video cameras used by troops recording their time in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of video cell phones in the hands of Iraqis, WHERE IS THE INEVITABLE VIDEO RECORD OF AN ALLEGED CALAMITY WORSE THAN THAT BROUGHT BY 10,000 BOMBERS DROPPING OVER A MILLION TONS OF BOMBS ON GERMANY SIXTY-FOUR YEARS AGO? Something like that can't stay hidden! WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE? There isn't any. The "650,000 Dead Iraqis" fairy tale came two years after the Lancet published the 2004 "100,000 Dead Iraqis" survey which used the same erroneous sampling technique...and which was promptly discredited. Both studies were timed to attempt to effect national elections in the U.S., which is where both studies originated. It was as if, disappointed by the inadequate outcry generated by the first story, the Johns Hopkins University authors decided they needed to inflate the numbers SIX TIMES OVER for a new specious study coming out only two years later! That ALONE should have made everyone suspicious of these cooked (or should I say "curbstoned") numbers. Yet, without any evidence to corroborate the scale of such an allegation, people chose to believe the story. It's all the more AMAZING, because when you lost your baby teeth and placed them under your pillow, the coins your parents left you (in place of those teeth) gave you MORE SOLID EVIDENCE of the Tooth Fairey's existence than you have for the "650,000 Dead Iraqis" fairey tale! So why do many well-meaning people believe it? Some believe it because they just hate the idea of war. Their sanitized, politically-correct lives, have been made sensitive by sixty-plus years seperation from the harsh realities of having to oppose vicious megalomaniacal dictators and defeat those dictators AT ALL COSTS (involving lots of killing including civilians who just "got in the way"). Such sensitivity is good in that it brought about precision strike warfare which has saved millions of live since WW2. But that sensitivity is bad when it brings foolish sentimentality, masquerading as a higher morality: "But one dead Iraqi is too many!" they moan...ignoring the truly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in Saddam Hussein's attempts at conquest (along with nearly a million Iranians)and the additional thousands killed because they fought his dictatorship (along with more hundreds of thousands of their relatives and neighbors whom he and his Baathist government murdered to ensure Iraqis silence through terror). THOSE DEATHS are proven facts with evidence in the form of bodies, graves, and pictures. And this doesn't even include the Iraqis who died because the uncaring Hussein kleptocracy chose to let them starve rather than importing food and medicine under United Nations control. Of course the "50,000 Dead Iraqis Per Year Caused By U.N. Sanctions" narrative also came from Dr Rihyad Lafta prior to his providing the sampling data for the Johns Hopkins study. Funny thing is, if you want to accept Lafta's data for post-2003, you have to accept it for 1991-2003 which indicates another 600,000+ Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam Hussein, bringing his total massacre of his country up to...ta-da...1,200,000-1,500,000 dead Iraqis BEFORE THE 2003 WAR. Either way, if you care about the Iraqi nation (and I have since the 1970's) removing the Hussein Baathist government was by far in the best interest of the Iraqi people as well as the interest of humanity. No, it's not the truly happy ending we Westerners want; if you accept more realistic, PROVABLE figures of 70,000 to 95,000 dead Iraqis, that is still far too many. And the fact that the majority of those were killed by other Iraqis working as (or with) terrorists is little comfort if you believe that ALL peoples lives matter (and, as the son of a WW2 fighter pilot, I certainly believe this). The fanciful Johns Hopkins/Lafta fairey-tale falls apart under the weight of its own hyperbole and, even if you accept its absurd assertions, Lafta's own previous work shows that Iraq today is far better off without the Saddam Regime. And if you still defy sense and believe the Lancet's politicised American "650,000 Dead Iraqis" tale, here's a wiff of pixie dust *** to keep you safe from the marauding cars on the M4.

Dean Morris

who really cares how many Iraqis died? They are liberated, ain't they? Bush and co deserve some sort of Nobel prize, surely? China next, my friends. People will die, sure, but so what? Liberation is what the Chinese people want and deserve, right? The only people against a US led invasion of China right now must be those evil lefties. Or cowards, too scared to take on the Chinese army. Sissymen afraid of their own meterosexual shadows. So which are ya? Evil leftie or cowardly rightie?

field

This is an absolute scandal. A that the time the Lancet study came out I did some research myself and pointed to the obvious defects in the study (not least the failure to cross check the alleged deaths against media reports or death certificates - if the study was correct only about 10% of the reported deaths would correlate with media reports, or indeed with death certificates). I also drew attention to the fact that we didn't know the background the Iraqi survey personnel or what role they had in Saddam's Iraq. It is outrageous that the Lancet - which should in any case be getting involved in these highly politicised issues - has been used in this way. If the Lancet editor of the time is still there they should resign for publishing a survey that anyone with half a brain cell could see was distorted and plain wrong. And Roger - what is the co-author saying? Is he saying the survey is accruate or not. Also, I have noted before that this stuff about doubling of death rate and so on depends on DISCOUNTING all the propaganda we had about hundreds of thousands of children dying from the sanctions (if that had been true then there would be no rise on the pre-war period)! The reality is quite bad enough without this politicised numbers game.

Jay Crawford

Mr Morris, it's a pity that the only way you seem to know how to respond is with a "straw man fallacy". I was writing about Iraq and you can't seem to argue against reason on that subject...so you switched subjects! Nonetheless, logic beards you in your new den. Regarding military action against China to free the Chinese people: 1) The current Chinese government is nowhere nearly as arbitrarily nasty as the past Iraqi government. It IS dictatorial but it's more practical and isn't engaged in large-sale starvation or murder of its own people. It's not as bad as Mao's oligarchical dictatorship; indeed, it's communist in little more than name. 2) Over the last thirty years economic forces (entrepenuerial capitalism) has been driving reforms in China...and bringing more freedom to its people as both a need and a practical result. This could not be said of pre-2003 Iraq. Unlike the Iraqis, China's people are succeeding because their leaders are less dominated by one man with his family's selfish kleptocracy and, especially, his cult of personality. 3) China is vastly more powerful, a practical issue to be considered in ANY military scenario; no matter how righteous our cause, our governments should never choose to fight if we can't win. Such action would only bring needless death to OUR own people while achieving nothing for anyone else's. Against Iraq, we could win a military struggle at an acceptable cost; against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, we could not...so we outlasted them, bankrupting them using their own paranoia. By comparison, China's middle-class is gradually freeing itself through increasing wealth, education, and higher expectations for their lives...and of their government. All we need to do, vis-a-vis China, is to protect their neighbors against any military aggression. Then, in time, their people will likely bring on the change to a stable representative democracy.

Andy Gill

A recent large scale study by the World Health Organization has put the figure of Iraqui dead at about 150,000. That suggests the Lancet figures are exaggerated by a factor of four. No surprise there then. If the Lancet is to regain its reputation, the editor, a supporter of the bogus study, and an admirer of George Galoway, should resign.