Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Elder of ZiyonSince the war in Gaza began in October 2023 the death toll has been hotly contested. Counting deaths in any war that is still raging is very hard. But experts are still trying to keep track. And new research suggests the reported numbers are too low.
This article relies on a paper published in The Lancet in January that uses what is known as a "capture-recapture" method to estimate Gaza deaths. The analysis depends on extrapolating data from three lists of casualties in Gaza - the Gaza health ministry list from hospitals, a list of presumably dead people from relatives, and a social media list.
As I showed then, the methodology relies on the idea that each list is independently created. The capture-recapture method only works when each data set is a random sample of the true total. But that is not what those lists are: the list from relatives is tallied by the same health ministry as an adjunct to the official hospital list, and there is no reason for relatives to add names that the health ministry already counted. In other words, there is a high negative correlation between the two lists, when the methodology demands that they are independent.
An additional factor is that the third list from places like Instagram - which affects the estimate a great deal - was used incorrectly, as demonstrated by statistician Abraham Wyner.
The Lancet article has been debunked months ago, but the journal did not publish Wyner's paper that he submitted within weeks of the original article. This fits a pattern of Lancet articles about the Gaza war that are proven to be based on bad statistics, bad assumptions or bad data. Now the bad science is being republished in The Economist as if it was settled science.
It is bad enough when the social sciences use the trappings of hard science to promote political agendas as established fact ("Israel is a settler-colonialist state.") It is far worse when supposedly scientific journals promote the same agendas by pretending that their math is unassailable - and then refuse to publish material that proves them wrong.
And the problem is multiplied when the bad science gets promoted by more popular (yet serious) media like The Economist, without the proper fact checking and skepticism that such papers warrant. Beyond that, The Economist illustrates its article with tragic photos from Gaza, implying that anyone who could possibly disagree with the article is a heartless monster.
Facts be damned. Agendas are more important.
Nazi Germany promoted "Aryan science." The Lancet is doing a modern version of the same, by only publishing articles about Gaza that fit their politics - and ignoring all counter-evidence. The Economist should know better than to blindly trust anything even in supposedly prestigious journals without checking itself.
I would happily eat my words if The Economist or The Lancet issues corrections. I am not holding my breath.
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