9 Comments From Right-Wing Shills On Lancet Report

[Jcrowley]

1. 655,000 is an awfully big number. That would mean that this war killed a whole lot of people.  (Jane Galt)
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009509.html

2. If 770 extra people were dying in Iraq every day, why don't we hear about them on the news?  (Gateway Pundit)
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html

3. The study was published before the election. (Instapundit) (Political Pitbull)
http://instapundit.com/archives/033162.php

4. The peer-reviewed paper must be bogus because the editor of the Lancet goes to anti-war rallies. (Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler)
http://www.nicedoggie.net/2006/?p=1500


5. The pre-invasion death rates are too low. Surely, Saddam was filling mass graves two months before the invasion. (Chuck Simmins)
http://northshorejournal.org/index.php/2006/10/deaths-in-iraq

6. Those peacenik scientists just wish there were more dead Iraqis. ("When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges," Omar Fadil.)
http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php

7. I just know the study's wrong, but I can't figure out how. Math people? (Michelle Malkin)
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/10/12/lancet-study-now-available-on-web/

8. Sure the study's methodology is standard for public health research. But don't forget that public health is a leftwing plot. (Medpundit)
http://medpundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/lancet-strikes-again-i-admit-this.html

9. These "statisticians" say that you can take a small sample from a large population and learn a lot about the whole population. As if.  I'll believe those 665,000 Iraqis are dead when they tell me so. (Tim Blair)
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/547_becomes_654965/

On edit:
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/10/innumerate_cowa.html

[twilight_sailing]

1. excellent

post

[BOSSHOG]

2. Wouldn't "conservatives" be cheering at this number?

600,000 "ragheads" killed by their great leader. Yeeehaw!!! Kill some more george. Me thinks they protest too much.

[kay1864]

3. Great selection! One thing though...

Where is that Malkin quote? I don't see it on that hotair.com link.

[Jcrowley]

14. Here's some info

While the New York Times decided to publicize the claim, it didn't consider the report front-page worthy, placing its story, “Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says,” on page A-16 (at least in the “Washington Final” edition) and the Times, unlike the Washington Post's article on page A-12, “Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000,” at least contained several caveats. Some excerpts from the October 11 New York Times story by Sabrina Tavernise and Donald G. McNeil Jr.:
A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

http://newsbusters.org/node/8261

There are several hyperlinks in the original article, see updated OP so perhaps the Malkin quote is there.

[BurtWorm]

4. Hey! Give majikthise credit for that!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Majikthise/~3/36507366/innumerate_cowa.html

[Jcrowley]

9. Thanks for that

I pulled it from a discussion and looked up the websites individually and posted links. What's really interesting/disturbing is to look at some of the comments in those links such as this:

"Whatever the number of dead in Iraq might be, it is my “opinion” that the overwhelming majority were PROBABLY the enemy, which means they “had it coming.”"

But there's also this:

Some of the objections here are sound. Some are just emotional blowing off steam. "How could this be?!?!" And some are just wrong. Two very wrong objections are: where are the bodies? And why don't they count death certificates?
Well, there are two easy answers to those questions. In Muslim culture, it is required that you bury the body before the end of the day. It's the same reason why major US attacks against insurgent forces end up with virtually no dead bodies, despite definitive claims from US soldiers that they killed dozens of insurgents. The bodies are buried immediately. They aren't embalmed. And they are rarely sent to a morgue. So it's not hard to answer where the bodies are: they were buried right away.
The objection about death certificates assumes that there is a neutral, functioning health ministry that can sign death certificates for every murder. Well, the Health Ministry is controlled by the Sadrists, and most Sunnis want nothing to do with them. Again, death certificates only represent a fraction of overall deaths in modern Iraq.
A better criticism is that the report over-samples Anbar. But Basra has not exactly been a peaceful place either. In fact, nowhere outside of Kurdistan has been peaceful, so it isn't hard to imagine rampant killings elsewhere.
Another sound criticism is that it assumes more peace in Saddam's time than is warranted. But I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make if we adjusted that upward.
But let's see if this passes the believability test. We know there are 110 reported deaths in Baghdad every day. Considering the suspicions of health ministry officials, it's safe to assume that the actual death toll is closer to 200 a day in Baghdad. Then there are other war-torn cities and towns like Ramadi, Samarra, Baquouba, Kut, Diwaniyah, Mosul, Kirkuk, Fallujah, Basra, Tal Afar, Tikrit, etc. Some of these places are more violent than Baghdad. Some are less violent. Taken together, is it hard to imagine 400 killed a day in all of these other cities combined? I don't think so.

http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php#c019439

[BurtWorm]

11. That's an excellent response.

:toast:

[Warren Stupidity]

5. "I just know the study's wrong, but I can't figure out how"

Faith based idiocy. My personal favorite. That Malkin is one load of stupid.

[Botany]

6. The paper is the work of John's Hopkins & Lancet, funded by M. I. T.

The Dr. who was the chief author has tons of experience too.

Form the Washington Post:

Bush said he does not find credible a new report in the Lancet, a British medical journal,
which estimates that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since coalition forces arrived than
would have died without the invasion. In a comment in the journal, the editors said the
study was reviewed by four outside experts, all of whom recommended publication, with
one noting the "powerful strength" of the research method. The findings, however, have a
large margin of error. The low-end estimate of excess deaths (both civilian and military) is
393,000, while the high-end estimate is 943,000.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/11/AR2006101100523_2.html

This was a serious scientific paper that was well vetted and peer reviewed.

1. Author's Bio ....

Dr. Gilbert M. Burnham is the co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins. He has extensive experience in emergency preparedness and response, particularly in humanitarian needs assessment, program planning, and evaluation that address the needs of vulnerable populations, and the development and implementation of training programs. He also has extensive experience in the development and evaluation of community-based health program planning and implementation, health information system development, management and analysis, and health system analysis. He has worked with numerous humanitarian and health development programs for multilateral and non-governmental organizations, regional health departments, ministries of health (national and district level), and communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. A major current activity is the reconstruction of health services in Afghanistan.

2. John's Hopkins is a world class institution.

3. Lancet is a Professional Publication ... ALL PAPERS ARE PEER REVIEWED PRIOR TO
PUBLICATION.

4. It was a study that was funded by M.I.T., and they don't fund crap. (most of the time)
They have thousands of people and groups looking for them to fund different research and
papers. I am sure that this was well vetted before the study got started. This is the same group
that did the 100,000 dead in Iraq in 2004 .... if that was not accurate then no way would M I T
fund this study.

5. Statistical analysis and proper sampling are very powerful tools.
And very accurate. bush talking about bad Q.A. / Q.C. in the study is
laughable.

[Phredicles]

15. And even 393,000 is an appalling figure, much higher

than anything we'd be hearing from "official" sources (when they have anything to say about this unpleasant topic at all).

And on the other hand, we could be pushing the million mark. How many people is Saddam suppused to have killed?

[ComerPerro]

7. Before someone says it, I openly admit that I doubt the study

for some of the same reasons as these postd above.

[BurtWorm]

8. Which ones.

[ComerPerro]

13. I don't want to get into it again, I'm tired of being flamed for this

essentially, i believe statistical surveys can be manipulated to say whatever the people conducting the study want it to. Sort of like how someone can conduct a poll in a specific way to produce whatever results they want.

Furthermore, I don't put all of my faith into this single source any sooner than I would put my faith into a Pentagon report.

Anti-war people want the casualty count to be reported as high as possible, pro-war people want to keep the casualty numbers as low as possible.


And could someone please explain to me why 2,000 (or whatever the total was) dead Iraqis in September is even newsworthy, since according to this study 500 of them die every day? Wouldn't an average month have 15000 casualties?

[Jcrowley]

19. Why is one war death newsworthy?

Because it matters. This report is very solid and in fact when the dust clears, if it ever does, the death toll will be into astronomical figures when one includes all the deaths caused from damaged infrastructure, limited food supplies, stress and innumerable other war-related horrors. Genocide by any calculation.

And let us remember that Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health is by far the leading and most prestigious public health research school in the world. And The Lancet is one of the top 3 peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Both Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Lancet require very rigorous and statistically sound methods before allowing publication.

The mortality survey used well-established and scientifically proven methods for measuring mortality and disease in populations. These same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions. For the Iraq study, data were collected from 47 randomly selected clusters of 40 households each. At each household selected, trained Iraqi surveyors collected data on the number of births and deaths that occurred in the household between January 1, 2002, and June 30, 2006. To be considered a household member, the deceased had to have lived in the home at least three months prior to death. When interviewers asked to see a death certificate at households reporting a death, it was presented in 92 percent of instances. The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area.

[BurtWorm]

20. The problem with that counter argument is that it doesn't address

the actual study. It only addresses the number. Thus, it's not really an argument at all, let alone a debunking. It's just a misinformed opinion. And I don't mean that in a bad way. ;) Seriously, I don't. I'm only pointing out that your opinion on it, as well as those of the pundits listed above, are uninformed. Not to say that anyone who buys the figure is any more informed than you are. But at least we can make the argument that it was peer-reviewed, which means it had to follow a standard for scientific research.

[ComerPerro]

21. Mortality rates for one or two regions can't be extended

over an entire population

[BurtWorm]

22. If they claim it's the same mortality rate in Baghdad as it is in Kirkuk

for example, you're right. I don't think they claim that, however. Do you?

[Viking12]

23. It has been pointed out to YOU before....

The study did not rely on 1 or two regions, but 50. You continue to argue from incredulity and you'll, deservedly, continue to get flamed.

[ComerPerro]

24. I am just being honest here

[BurtWorm]

25. But is it honest to call 50 regions "one or two"?

Awaiting your honest answer. ;)

[ComerPerro]

26. LOL. I'm not getting into the flames And I recognize

that you're giving me a hard time in good spirit.

What I mean by "I'm being honest" is that I am just admitting that some DUers question this study too.

In fact, I got 3 PMs from different people, longtime posters, who expressed their own doubts.


Lets just say: I hope its not true. Its an unspeakable crime already, but if these numbers are close to correct, this is a serious war crime.

[BurtWorm]

27. The point of the study was to find out how the war has affected the death

rate in Iraq, compared to it pre-invasion. They did not find, contrary to popular misconception, that 650,000 were killed since March 2003. They found that between 400,000 and 900,000 died above what would have been expected had the invasion not taken place. And they carefully explain their methodology. The 650,000 figure is just a best guess, but the range is a bit wider than a lot of people seem to grasp.

[ComerPerro]

29. I know how they did it. But quoting it as a literal figure is dangerous

[BurtWorm]

38. How so?

[moc]

42. That's not what they did.

The clusters are different regions.

Read the damn study, why don't you, before you continue making stupid criticisms.

[leftchick]

18. have you read it?

take a look at this evaluation of the survey...


He breaks it down very well and why it is as accurate as is possible....

<snip>

First, don't concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths - it's basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html

[moc]

41. So you never bothered to read my post, did you?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2375230&mesg_id=2384144

So glad I took all that time.

:eyes:

[tenshi816]

10. Jeebus.

"655,000 is an awfully big number. That would mean that this war killed a whole lot of people." No matter how many times I read shit like this, I'm still knocked out by it. Maybe it's because I'm so far away from the States but, damn, it always surprises me when I'm reminded just how absolutely bloody boneheaded right-wingers are.

[BurtWorm]

16. (It's a snarky caricature of the actual argument.)

Just to be sure you understand, she (Linsday Bayerstein of majikthise.com was the source of the above) was snarkily summarizing the winger attempts to debunk the number. Follow the links, if you're curious, to read the actual arguments. They'll be similar to what you find in the list, with a few more words and gusts of hot air thrown in. ;)

[tenshi816]

17. Thanks, I'll do that.

I went down the list and my head exploded before I read anything else!

[mac56]

12. To be in any way justifying this body count, this slaughter

because they want to quibble over "methodology" is pathetic beyond words. Unspeakably criminal.

One poster on the hotair.com site wrote "the more dead, the better". That seems to sum up their groupthink.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

28. Frankly, they sound to me like holocaust deniers.

Yes, holocaust deniers.

[mac56]

30. absolutely

That's exactly right.

[paulk]

31. you don't need to be a right winger to question the Lancet studies

AFAIK, the 2nd study uses the same methodology as the first, and I've always wondered at the validity of a study (the first one)that had such a large estimate range to go from - 8,000 to 194,000.

here, quoted from a left wing source, Z-Mag - who uses the study to conclude that the number could have been even higher...



"In interpreting this estimate, the researchers, like all good researchers, give an estimate of its precision. This is done by providing what are known as 95% confidence intervals. These mean that, 95% of the time, the true value is between the lower and upper limits of the confidence interval (remember, these are estimates). Given the nature of the study, the confidence intervals for this 98,000 estimate are broad, from 8,000 to 194,000. Thus, it is 95% likely that the true rate of excess deaths is between 8,000 and 198,000. "


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6565


That just seems like too broad of a spread of possibilities, IMO, to take the numbers from Lancet as gospel.

[Name removed]

32. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. And the range this time is 426,369 to 793,663

more accurate than the previous survey, becasue they samples about twice as many households.

[paulk]

35. to you have a link to the methodology of the newest survey?

I would be interested in reading more about it.

I'm always willing to reassess.

[Jcrowley]

36. Go here

At link you'll see the words "a study", which I've put in bold in the first paragraph, click there and read the 25 page report.

US, Britain reject study that claims Iraqi death toll tops 600,000

But some experts support results, which were extrapolated from interviews with Iraqi families.
By Tom Regan  | csmonitor.com

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, in cooperation with Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have released a study that says more than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq following the US-led invasion of that country.

The Guardian reports that authors of the study say that nearly 31 percent of the deaths were caused by coalition troops, while most of the remaining fatalities were caused by violence such as gunshot wounds (56 percent) and car bombs.

"Although such death rates might be common in times of war," write the authors, Professor Gilbert Burnham and colleagues, "the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone.

"At the conclusion of our 2004 study we urged that an independent body assess the excess mortality that we saw in Iraq. This has not happened.

"We continue to believe that an independent international body to monitor compliance with the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian standards in conflict is urgently needed. With reliable data, those voices that speak out for civilians trapped in conflict might be able to lessen the tragic human cost of future wars."

British medical journal The Lancet, which published the new study online, published a similar study in 2004 that also created a controversy over the number of Iraqis killed. But the Guardian reports that for the new study, the authors of the piece had it reviewed by four independent experts, who all urged the research be published. One of the reviewing experts noted the "powerful strength" of the research methods, "which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1012/dailyUpdate.html

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths. Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.



The latest study in the Lancet about Iraqi deaths is staggering: they calculate that 655,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003, about 500 per day since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics will quibble about the methodology used in the study. The authors themselves say that the range of deaths runs from 426,369 to 793,663. I'm willing to take the low-end. So more than 426,000 Iraqis have been killed by George W. Bush's war.

I can't resist pointing out that even Saddam Hussein's worst detractors estimate that 300,000 Iraqis died during his reign. I happen to believe that that number is wildly inflated, and certainly it isn't based on any sort of research. It's just a number promoted (before the invasion in 2003) to demonize Saddam. But even if it's true, George Bush has surpassed in three bloody years what took Saddam three decades in power to accumulate.

P.S. Here's a link to the .pdf version of the original Lancet story. It's technical, but read it.
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/10/655000.html

And here's another bit to read:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15267.htm

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15275.htm

Noone has discredited the initial Lancet report, not even disputed by any academic journal or study that I've seen, I've seen quite a few. This particular methodology is even more thorough and more comprehensive.

And let us remember that Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health is by far the leading and most prestigious public health research school in the world. And The Lancet is one of the top 3 peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Both Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Lancet require very rigorous and statistically sound methods before allowing publication.

The mortality survey used well-established and scientifically proven methods for measuring mortality and disease in populations. These same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions. For the Iraq study, data were collected from 47 randomly selected clusters of 40 households each. At each household selected, trained Iraqi surveyors collected data on the number of births and deaths that occurred in the household between January 1, 2002, and June 30, 2006. To be considered a household member, the deceased had to have lived in the home at least three months prior to death. When interviewers asked to see a death certificate at households reporting a death, it was presented in 92 percent of instances. The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area.

[paulk]

39. thanks

this survey seems more credible than the first one.

[muriel_volestrangler]

37. The study is available on The Lancet website

you have to register (free).

Also: a commentary by the Lancet editor: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1920005,00.html

Juan Cole, with an extract from the survey about its methodology: http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/655000-dead-in-iraq-since-bush.html

[stepnw1f]

33. There is Nothing more Shameful than Someone Who Can't Admit

when they are wrong and have been wrong for soooo long. It's as embarrassing to witness as when watching a really bad sinegr make a fool out of themselves.... I think most of these people are nuts.

[SalmonChantedEvening]

40. Judas Jumpin' Freakin' Priest

The Black Knight Brigade is at it again.

It's just a flesh wound....