Jousting with the Lancet: Pajamas Media Interviews Professor Gilbert Burnham
Anti-war excuses for this flawed study:
1. “the 655.000 figure is excess deaths” Yes, and 601.000 of it is due to violence. Since the paper writes what people (claimed) their family members died of it is easy to assign it to difference causes. For example 130 people have died per day every day in car/suicide bombings since the war started. Oddly enough the media has only reported 5% of these deaths.
2. “how many papers have you published? Huh? This is the LANCET, and therefore above reproach”.
Desperate argument to refer to authority. Nevertheless the fact that it is a prestigious paper makes the weak arguments more interesting. Science is not immune to ideology.
Lastly to Sum guy who called people here “stupid” and than gave us this gem:
“The statistics provide a 95% confidence level that the “true” death toll is somewhere between ~300,000 and ~900,000 dead. 300k is just as likely as 650k, which is also as likely as 900k.”
The interval is only interesting if the sampling is correct, which is clearly unlikely here. Furthermore if you think the middle of a confidence interval is “as likely” as the tails I have to congratulate the American education system. Perhaps a couple of more classes in statistics instead of socialist dogma would have done you good?
By the way not all anti-war leftists are idiots. This debunking of the Lancet study is the best I have seen
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php
Especially important is the point about death certificates. If the study is indeed correct in it’s sampling, we should have seen at least 500.000 death certificates with the cause of death being violence issued by the Iraqi authorities. This is the premises of the study after all.
Where are those records? Why not go from death certificated directly, instead of random sampling, that is sensitive to statistical (and in this case political) bias?
