On Jan 13, 3:25 pm, "Tom Kunich" cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,322417,00.html

"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 nearly $100,000
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"


1. The Burnham study in question had been commissioned in the Fall of
2005 by MIT, using MIT's own internal funding. Soros gave money to MIT
in the Spring of 2006 -- after the study had already been commissioned
and was underway -- for public education purposes, not for the study.
Burnham was not told that Soros had donated funds to MIT for the
purposes of public education.

2. The FoxNews story is incorrect about the estimate itself. The WHO/
MoH study did not estimate that 151,000 people had died since the
invasion in 2003; it estimated that 151,000 people had died of violent
causes since the invasion in 2003. The overall all-cause estimate of
"excess" mortality from the WHO study was 400,000, which was within
the error margin of Burnham's estimate of 650,000.

3. The 2006 Burnham study was an update of a 2004 study whose lead
author was Roberts, that had produced an estimate of all-cause excess
deaths from the invasion in March 2003 to September 2004 of 98,000.
The WHO/MoH study produces an estimate of excess deaths for that same
period of (drumroll) 100,000.