New Critique of the Lancet's Civilian Death Claims

Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 8:30:15 am PDT

In 2004, British medical journal The Lancet released a study in the final days leading up to the US presidential election. Their attempted October Surprise was heavily promoted by international media and the international left (there’s a difference?), and claimed the US was responsible for more than 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Then, in 2006, they published another study with even more wildly inflated claims.

Today Michelle Malkin has posted a new critique of the Lancet’s 2004 study, a statistical analysis by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University—who identifies serious problems in the Lancet’s methodology: Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.