The Lancet has been a prestigious British medical journal for 150 years, at least until recently. It began to falter with the bogus study associating childhood vaccines with autism. That study was eventually shown to be fraudulant and funded by lawyers. More recently, it has gotten itself heavily involved with the politics of the Iraq War. Now, its major study of Iraqi casualties has been exposed as a fraud. The political left has been complaining that the cause of science is harmed by religious conservatives who do not accept evolution or who oppose stem cell research. It now appears that the fundamentalists were amateurs in the business of politicizing science.
And we haven’t even gotten to the subject of global warming.
Little Green Footballs has accumulated a list of links to stories debunking the Lancet story.
Tags: casualties, epidemiology, iraq, politics, Soros
Dear Dr. K.:
I’ll bet you cash money that this story doesn’t appear anywhere in the MSM, or is discussed in the national news magazines.
The debate is over, remember?
Seriously, this is a great example of why science and politics should never, ever meet. They are toxic toward one another.
One more thing, Dr. K. The thing that scientists don’t “get” about this kind of thing is that when they are caught using scientific authority to push a political agenda—without objective data to back things up—all they do is destroy *all* of their credibility to the public.
The result is that the public takes scientists as seriously as they take politicians, who are caught routinely lying and exaggerating for personal/political gain.
Science should be—and often is—better than that. Such a shame. But then, look at Scientific American these days….
Scientific American was thoroughly run through with left wing politics when I was a medical student. We invited Gerrard Piehl, the publisher, to speak to our medical school assembly. We had a speakers program in those days. Another speaker was Dr Spock. Both were far left politcally and the magazine showed it.
I sure hope Little Green Footballs didn’t link to my commentary on the Lancet article. I wouldn’t be able to take enough mental showers to get rid of that image.
Scientists do “get it”. That’s why we have peer review and do repetitive studies. Eventually, a consensus will arise on whatever topic. The system worked in this case. I didn’t care for the results of this study simply because the data looked like an outlier compared to other data sources. I give the authors the benefit of the doubt that they thought they had accurate data, although I don’t think they did. I do think whoever reviewed the Lancet article probably should not be used as a reviewer again. I also agree that the editor should take some of the blame for agreeing to publish such a study without another level of rigorous review (which may or may not have been done). Extraordinary claims require extraordiary evidence.
Finally, whether 30,000 innocent Iraqis lost their lives or 600,000 lost their lives, it was one too many.
I detect a very reluctant critic of the Lancet in that last comment. “I give the authors the benefit of the doubt that they thought they had accurate data, although I don’t think they did. ” I don’t. I think they came to their conclusion, with which you agree, then “found” data to support it. The same people were lamenting the “thousands of children” dying due to the sanctions before the invasion. They never gave a moment’s thought to the diversion of the proceeds of oil sales in the “oil-for-food” program to building palaces. This is intellectual dishonesty. That sometimes leads to embarrassing results, as we see here.