The Lancet’s anti-Israel pseudoscience

Politics has a uniquely transformative effect on science. When a scientific article is published in a political journal, the journal remains political. But when a political article is published in a scientific journal, that journal becomes political. That is what happened recently, when the Lancet, arguably the most respected medical journal in the world, published thinly disguised propaganda as scientific information.

Earlier this month, the Lancet published a letter to the editor from three researchers, which speculated on the number of deaths that will occur as a result of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Two of the authors have a history of extreme anti-Israel bias.

Their estimates are riddled with problems. The authors took as their starting point the official death toll at the time of writing, of 37,396 deaths – a number so precise it should already be setting off alarm bells. These figures, produced by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, have faced a huge amount of criticism and scepticism. Nevertheless, the authors of the Lancet letter felt that even this number was too low as it does not include ‘indirect deaths’ that will continue into the future.

‘Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases’, they wrote. According to the researchers, ‘In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.’

Needless to say, that number strains credulity. This would represent nearly eight per cent of Gaza’s population. The use of the phrase ‘in the coming months and years’ is ridiculously open-ended. Does this mean we should be counting deaths for one year after hostilities cease? Five years? Twenty years? Employing a long enough observation period, the authors can basically attribute any number of deaths of their choosing to the war.

The authors also provide no definition of what constitutes a delayed death as a consequence of the war. Indirect deaths from ‘reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases’ is basically medical gibberish, signifying nothing. What diseases, specifically? Currently, there is a minor outbreak of mosquito-borne West Nile Virus – a ‘non-communicable disease’ – in Israel near the Gaza border, although there have been no reported cases in Gaza yet. Five years hence, if there are deaths in Gaza from West Nile Virus, will those be counted as a result of the war? We have obviously exited the realm of science here.

The eye-catching nature of the 186,000 figure, as well as the fact it was published in such a well-respected medical journal, has turned it into international news. It has been seized on by pro-Palestine campaigners. It was spray-painted by vandals on the ground by the Cenotaph in London last week, and has been quoted as fact by a Labour MP.

Some might try to argue that these outlandish figures are in no way being endorsed by the Lancet, as they were published in a letter and not a peer-reviewed article. But this is tosh. Peer-reviewed articles naturally carry more weight because they are more carefully scrutinised by outside reviewers. However, letters to the editor are not published at random. They are not akin to below-the-line comments on a website. They must be approved by an in-house editor and the vast majority are rejected. Approval and subsequent publication confers the imprimatur of a prestigious medical journal, whether the editorial staff publicly agrees with the letter or not. The fact that this was published at all carries some kind of implication.

Nor was this incident a one-off for the Lancet. The journal was previously involved with a different type of well-publicised scientific innumeracy during the Iraq War in the 2000s. In 2006, it published a study claiming that there had been 655,000 excess deaths in three years of war. This would have meant 500 deaths daily or 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population. This surely could not have gone unnoticed by the authorities or journalists present, none of whom reported such daily carnage at the time. More recent analyses suggest the mortality figures were considerably lower than those published in the Lancet. The study, well-quoted by the anti-war community at the time, has been discredited by many sources.

The Iraq War study and the Gaza letter are examples of agenda-driven scientific reporting. Sadly, this phenomenon is not restricted to the Lancet. Respected American medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association have abandoned objectivity in numerous editorials, letters to the editor and scientific reports. A recent study that examined content from Nature, Science and Scientific American – three of the world’s top scientific journals – found a growing number of political articles published at the expense of scientific ones.

The Lancet’s nakedly partisan Gaza letter cannot be unseen. It is the latest example of an insidious trend in medical journals of abandoning their role as neutral reporters, while simultaneously using science to advance political causes. This pernicious drift into politics will do immeasurable long-term damage to the scientific world – and to the public seeking its guidance.

Cory Franklin’s new book, The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.