Soros Paid for Bogus War Dead Study

This report should surprise nobody. George Soros' taint is usually affixed to anti-American studies. In fact, one customarily doesn't have to search long to discover that Soros money is the bedrock of anti-U.S. efforts.

A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

"The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research," said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The fact that The Lancet published the bogus numbers while surely aware that Soros funded the effort is also quite telling. The Lancet obviously has its own political agenda. As a reminder, the study with the bogus number was published immediately prior to the 2006 elections with the goal of swaying voter opinion.

By the way, as an exercise in frustration, try to keep track of all the leftists who keep quoting the 650,000 number.