THE LANCET: MEDICAL JOURNAL OR ACTIVIST RAG?

Richard Horton, certified moonbat and George Galloway support act, has had an interesting tenure as editor of The Lancet. In 1998 The Lancet published former Horton colleague Andrew Wakefield's bogus study linking the MMR vaccine to autism, laying the groundwork for a legal assault on the vaccine's evil profit-making manufacturer.

When it became obvious that Wakefield's study was fatally flawed -- one of the problems being the extremely small cherry-picked sample of only 12 children -- Horton immediately turned on Wakefield, disowning (in an underhanded way) the study. But the damage had been done, however, with concerned parents in developed nations shunning the vaccine -- contributing to something of a mumps epidemic and parental distrust of vaccines in general.

In 1999 The Lancet published a study by Dr Arpad Pusztai and Dr Stanley Ewen making controversial claims regarding the safety of GM foods. Following Pusztai's comments that publication in The Lancet vindicated his research findings Horton commented:

"This is absolutely not a vindication of Dr Pusztai's claims. But we can now draw a line under the phoney debate we have had for the last year."

Anti-GM activists clearly saw The Lancet's publication of the study as crucial:

Charles Secrett, executive director of anti-GM campaigners Friends of the Earth said: "We think the publication of the work in the Lancet is very important indeed. There is no scientific consensus about the safety of GM food. The government should stop all GM trials and take the precautionary approach - it is better to be safe than sorry."

The Royal Society was not amused at The Lancet's publication of the GM food study, which it regarded as flawed, with Horton claiming he was threatened with violence.

In 2005 Horton attacked the Royal Society for its lack of activism calling it "a lazy institution resting on its historical laurels" and "little more than a shrill and superficial cheerleader for British science." The Royal Society was not amused.

It's therefore no surprise that Horton has again published an Iraq death toll study by socialist darling Les Roberts. They worked together to try to swing the 2004 presidential election, as Horton has pretty much admitted:

"For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts."

It's no surprise that highly educated lefty activistists are again trying to influence an American election using the tools available to them.

Update: In 2003 The Lancet publicly advised doctors to "pause before prescribing" AstraZeneca's anti-cholesterol drug Crestor. The company was accused of marketing the drug "too hard and too fast." The drug has been successful nonetheless.

Update II: A survey published in The Lancet paints a damning picture of post-Aristide Haiti:

A shocking new report in the British medical journal the Lancet on human rights abuses in Haiti finds that 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 women and girls raped during the U.S.-backed coup regime that followed Jean Bertrand Aristide.

An impartiality issue has emerged, however:

Ms. Kolbe herself is now the subject of controversy after revelations that the 30-year-old master's degree student at Wayne State University's school of social work in Detroit used to be an advocacy journalist who wrote under the name Lyn Duff and worked at a Haitian orphanage founded by Mr. Aristide.

"How can Kolbe/Duff's research into the issues of human-rights violations be regarded as objective when she herself states that for 3.5 years she worked with the Lafanmi Selavi centre for street children, where she befriended Aristide himself and presumably some of the boys who later left the centre . . . [who] then acted as armed enforcers?" Charles Arthur, co-ordinator of the British-based Haiti Support Group, wrote this week in a letter of complaint to The Lancet

Maybe it's just me but it sure looks like The Lancet gets involved in lots of controversies.