Soros Donation Paid for Iraq War Study

A controversial 2006 study that estimated 650,000 people had died as a result of the Iraq war was partially paid for by a donation from George Soros’s charitable foundation, reports The Sunday Times, in London. The study, appearing in the medical journal The Lancet, received almost half of its financing from the antiwar billionaire.

The 650,000-casualty figure was substantially higher than other estimates; recent research in The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, estimates that 151,000 people have died since the invasion. The Lancet study, commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been cited by the antiwar movement and denounced by the Bush Administration.

While The Lancet did not break any rules in accepting the donation from Mr. Soros’s Open Society Institute, the study’s lead researcher, Les Roberts, remarked, “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”