Jousting with the Lancet: Pajamas Media Interviews Professor Gilbert Burnham
I am a medical student, and I am also working on my master’s degree in epidemiology. You people are pretty much all suffering from denial, which is very human and understandable, but also very tragic. You let what you want to believe influence your handling of facts.
Someone wrote: “would you want your doctor to get his medical information from the Lancet?” To that, I can respond, I most certainly will, as well as JAMA, NEJM, and everything else on the Medline and PubMed databases.
This is not a complex study. Cross-sectional population-based cluster sampling is considered the gold standard for estimating mortality in developing and unstable regions. Dr. Burnham’s methodology is superb.
The most grievous sin a scientist can commit is to make up data. Are you really paranoid enough to believe this to be true? Do you think that a peer-reviewed journal like the Lancet is too stupid to notice and take no action? Occasionally, ego- and prestige-driven scientists do make up data, and they are invariably caught and utterly disgraced. But I can tell you that absolutely no one goes into the field of epidemiology for the prestige or money. You have to be ridiculously intelligent, the pay is terrible, and the hours are extremely long and stressful. They did this study because they cared.
Do you think that people get PhDs in a field like this by being stupid and petty? How many of you have what it takes? Not very many. This research team is caring and insanely committed to gathering good data, putting their lives at extreme risk to do so. I can tell you that among my medical student peers, we all accept the findings of Dr. Burnham. We, who averaged 1500 on our SATs and 34 on our MCATs, hold this research team in the highest regard. History will vindicate him from your ridiculous interpretations of his study, and will lump you together with the ideologues who deny the Holocaust occurred.
How many of you can actually describe what a cohort study is? A case-control study? Do you know how to calculate attributable risk? Who among you can do the most basic of statistical calculations? Variance? An F-test? Who can tell me how to calculate a p-value? Do you have any idea what SPSS and SAS are? Or are you just another armchair critic, too lazy and ignorant to get a useful education that is of some use to the rest of humankind?
Why isn’t anyone attacking the CIA’s prewar mortality estimate for Iraq? You are cherry picking your data, and I think you are fools for it.
