Do a bit of research, and you'll find that that "study" was severely flawed and the "findings" just plain wrong.
Such studies designed to generate headline-grabbing headlines are usually written along the same lines. When the party you want to bash shows up, everything in life must suddenly turn 100% risk-free.
If a man engages in high risk sexual behavior and contracts AIDS, then gets a pneumonia resistant to everything except the most high risk antibiotic treatment combination and then the toxicity of that high risk treatment kills the patient.............Then "Modern Medicine killed that patient" according to such a study.
Another example of such a study is the "100,000 Iraqi Civilians Died in the Iraq War" study that Left-wingers seem to quote in every Letter to the Editor that they write.
I wrote the following reply to one such Letter to the Editor in our local paper.
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Without taking into account the number of Iraqis no longer being put into mass graves by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Mr.XXXX stated that the Iraq War was “immoral” based on a claim of “the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children.” killed by the Iraq War. The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health study that generated that number deserves scrutiny.
The Hopkins researchers did not see a single dead Iraqi. Instead, they interviewed 30 Iraqi households in 33 “clusters” in Iraq and asked about deaths in each household before and after the Iraq War. They then estimated a pre and post Iraq War death rate based on the answers, be they true or false, that they were given. The difference in the death rates, the Hopkins researchers claimed, was the number of so-called “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War”.
Two-thirds of all the violent deaths reported in the study took place in a single cluster: the Fallujah cluster that was the hotbed of Baathist Party. Yet, every so-called “excess death”, reported as caused by anything whatsoever from a lung cancer to getting struck by lightning , was automatically classified as an “excess death caused by the Iraq War” by the Hopkins researchers.
. Even worse, the “excess death” number was grossly inflated by using a falsely low pre-war death rate in the calculations. The pre 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate, according to the United Nations, was 6.8 per 1,000. The post 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate claimed by the Hopkins researchers was only 5.0 per 1,000. The same people who once claimed that one million Iraqis, including half a million children, were killed by U.N sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War now want us to believe that the death rate in Iraq actually DECREASED after the 1991 Gulf War in order to validate the Hopkins study numbers.
It’s a classic case of the GIGO (Garbage In – Garbage Out) Effect: “If invalid data is entered in a computer program, the resulting output will also be invalid.”
The most damning critique of the Hopkins study, however, is the study’s own “Confidence Interval” number. The Hopkins study stated, “We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.”
What does that mean in plain English? (95% CI 8000-194 000) means that the Hopkins researchers were 95% confident that their “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War” came out to anywhere from 8,000 deaths to 194,000 deaths.
What’s the population of (…our…) County? Well, there is a 95% chance that it is somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000.
As a critic of the Hopkins study wrote, “This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.”
A detailed critique of the flaws of the Hopkins study can be found at Democrat-friendly MSNBC Slate.com at the following URL:
100,000 Dead—or 8,000 How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?