Bloomberg Declines To Criticize Professors of Bloomberg School
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Mayor Bloomberg is defending the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University after a report, written by two professors, on Iraq war casualties was called into question by the National Journal and dubbed a “political hit” by the Wall Street Journal.
The report, published in a British medical journal weeks before the 2006 election, found that there were 655,000 casualties in Iraq, far greater than other estimates.
When asked about the use of his name and money in connection with the report, the mayor said professors at the Bloomberg school “are just some of the great, honest academics, the most talented academics around. They will do their studies and you will have to talk to them.”
He said universities don’t ask their donors “to vet studies.” He later added that he has no knowledge of what the professors wrote and said “it would be totally inappropriate for me to criticize.”
The Wall Street Journal attacked the study in an editorial published January 9, saying: “It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident.”
A philanthropist and critic of President Bush, George Soros, helped fund the study, the National Journal reported.
In a letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, one of the authors of the study, Les Roberts, who now works at Columbia University, wrote that the editorial “was a unique blend of error and innuendo,” and he disputed the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion that the results of the study are suspect because of Mr. Soros’s financial support.
The other author, Gilbert Burnham, wrote that he only learned last month that the Soros Foundation had contributed some funding for the study.
He said the study “followed the standard peer review process used by medical journals everywhere.”
“The fieldwork was carried out in accordance with standard procedures, though the conflict made the survey process much more difficult than most studies,” he wrote.
The school of public health at Johns Hopkins was named after Mr. Bloomberg in April 2001, after he donated $100 million to the university.
In 2006, he gave another $100 million.
