The U.K Times Online reports interesting new questions about the infamous Lancet study by Burnham et al which claimed that more than 650,000 Iraqis died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion. Some of those questions are being asked by a Columbia University researcher who collaborated with Burnham et al on the previous version of the same survey:

Dr Richard Garfield, an American academic who had collaborated with the authors on an earlier study, declined to join this one because he did not think that the risk to the interviewers was justifiable. Together with Professor Hans Rosling and Dr Johan Von Schreeb at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Dr Garfield wrote to The Lancet to insist there must be a “substantial reporting error” because Burnham et al suggest that child deaths had dropped by two thirds since the invasion. The idea that war prevents children dying, Dr Garfield implies, points to something amiss….

Dr Garfield also queries the high availability of death certificates. [Ed note: The Lancet study claims that more than 90 percent of interviewees were able to produce death certificates.] Why, he asks, did the team not simply approach whoever was issuing them to estimate mortality, instead of sending interviewers into a war zone?

Good questions. Will all of the MSM outlets who trumpeted the study start asking them? And will they report the answers with as much sensationalism as they did when the study first appeared?