[Undertoad]

Peer review says the second Lancet study is bogus as hell and probably even fraud

This is the first time I've mentioned the second Lancet study.

I thought it was very obviously bullshit, but it's good to see the status of the Emperor's clothes is finally covered in major media.

I pat myself on the back, as they ask the same question I did on day one.

Dr Garfield also queries the high availability of death certificates. Why, he asks, did the team not simply approach whoever was issuing them to estimate mortality, instead of sending interviewers into a war zone?

This was the point that stuck hard in my craw. If civil society has not declined to the point where bodies are not buried and death certificates not signed, that is one thing. But it never did. But the study specifically asked for death certificates as proof. If there are certificates, there is somebody official printing and signing them. Why not just go to that source and ask how many? Did it take ten toner cartridges or only one?

Another critic is Dr Madelyn Hsaio-Rei Hicks, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who specialises in surveying communities in conflict. In her letter to The Lancet, she pointed out that it was unfeasible for the Iraqi interviewing team to have covered 40 households in a day, as claimed. She wrote: "Assuming continuous interviewing for ten hours despite 55C heat, this allows 15 minutes per interview, including walking between households, obtaining informed consent and death certificates."


Does she think the interviews were done at all? Dr Hicks responds: "I'm sure some interviews have been done but until they can prove it I don’t see how they could have done the study in the way they describe."


Professor Burnham says the doctors worked in pairs and that interviews "took about 20 minutes". The journal Nature, however, alleged last week that one of the Iraqi interviewers contradicts this. Dr Hicks says: : "I have started to suspect that they [the American researchers] don’t actually know what the interviewing team did. The fact that they can't rattle off basic information suggests they either don’t know or they don’t care."

The first Lancet study was released a week before the 2004 elections. It didn't rattle very hard until after the election. The second Lancet study was released a month before the 2006 elections. Did you smell something? One of the article's authors certainly understands the US election cycle:

If you factor in politics, the heat increases. One of The Lancet authors, Dr Les Roberts, campaigned for a Democrat seat in the US House of Representatives and has spoken out against the war.