The George Washington University department that produced a report significantly raising the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria has been funded by left-wing globalist billionaire George Soros for years.
The Milken Institute School of Public Health at GWU, which is named in honor of junk bond criminal and leading donor Michael Milken, released a report in late August projecting the death toll from the hurricane to be 2,975 – far higher than previous reports.
This so-called "fact" has been used by Big Media to hammer President Trump, who had the temerity to question an estimated number based on a rather dicey projection.
Weak Science
The Milken School researchers simply compared death figures from the post-hurricane months to the average number of deaths of the same timeframe during previous years, and found that there were more deaths than average following the storm. Attributing these deaths to Hurricane Maria has raised the storm's official death toll by thousands, but does this supposition stand up to scrutiny? The study has been derided as poor science by critics who see it depending heavily on one variable and then using that thin string as an excuse to estimate increased deaths in the months after the hurricane that cannot be proven to be related to the storm.
Page 3 of the report admits:
"In the case of Puerto Rico we reviewed in- and out migration over the last decade and the net migration result was negative. The increase in out-migration has affected the population’s demographics, and the storm accelerated this trend."
Younger people are leaving Puerto Rico. More left after the hurricane. The remaining older population would thus naturally seem to have a higher death rate. There is no way, therefore, that increased deaths after the hurricane can be solely pinpointed to the storm.
Steve Haner, writing at the Virginia politics blog Bacon's Rebellion, points out the ludicrousness of this projection:
"Here’s my question, the itch not addressed in the report, that I saw: Who left? Who departed following the storm? Would the elderly, infirm and impoverished have been the ones to decamp to the mainland? Or would they have been the one’s [sic] left behind? Doesn’t the shift in the baseline also at least in part explain this? The death rate really only jumped dramatically when you reduce the baseline population."
Haner also explains how the study's criticism of local authorities for not directly connecting post-hurricane deaths to the storm is a convenient way of justifying the increased death toll projection that the report itself wants to make:
"There are not 3,000 death certificates noting hurricane-related causes (loss of electricity, stress, poor transportation response) and the authors chide the local medical community for not being sufficiently exact in filling out their death certificates. So they are left with models and projections and estimates, which have translated into MSM-accepted Truth."
Soros Dollars
It should be no surprise that the usual suspects in the media would run with such poorly contrived "science" and use it as yet another club to swing at their perpetual nemesis, President Trump. A closer look at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, however, reveals an outfit far removed from any plausible claim to be pursuing "objective" research.
Let's start with the Soros funding.
The institute's 2016 annual Progress Report clearly lists Soros's Open Society Institute as one of its donors in its "Donor Acknowledgement" section on page 60. The 2014 annual report lists the Open Society Foundations as a donor on page 50.
The Open Society Foundations, formerly known as the Open Society Institute, is the international grantmaking network of George Soros. Soros, of course, is an avowed opponent of President Trump and his America First agenda.
A casual look at other Milken Institute for Public Health programs shows proud connections to Soros and his ever-bulging wallet. A 2014 report on "Medicaid Coverage for Prescription Naloxone" prominently credits Soros's organization for its aid on the project:
The report was authored by Ms. Naomi Seiler, associate research professor of health policy; Ms. Katherine Horton, research professor of health policy; and Ms. Mary-Beth Malcarney, assistant research professor; their work was supported by the Open Society Foundations.
The institute on its website notes that one of its professors, Jerome Paulson, "was a recipient of a Soros Advocacy Fellowship for Physicians from the Open Society Institute." A quick perusal of Paulson's active Twitter feed shows him to be in the throes of a particularly virulent strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome. A typical tweet:
Connect the Dots
And then there is Lynn Goldman, the dean of the school. As Julie Kelly aptly details on the American Greatness website, Goldman is a former Hillary Clinton Environmental Protection Agency official and "peddler of climate change propaganda."
Kelly lists several instances of blatant anti-Trump bias on the part of Goldman, including the fact that "[i]n an interview in February 2017, Goldman explained how she would try to avoid implementing any of Trump’s executive orders if she still worked at the EPA."
None of this, of course, kept CBS News from presenting Goldman as a paragon of impartial scientific research.
It's interesting to note that CBS's parent corporation is National Amusements, Inc., a company controlled by Sumner Redstone. Check that Milken name link again at the top of this article. Along with Michael Milken, Redstone was a top donor to this GWU "institute" supposedly dedicated to public health, with Milken and Redstone "setting a donation record for the private university."
Just a coincidence, no doubt.
So to recap: A completely partisan and phony university "public health" department funded by George Soros cooked up a report with conclusions it wanted to reach via very sketchy projections.
Those projections were then blindly accepted as fact by major media outlets like CBS News, which just so happens to be controlled by a major donor to that very same phony university research department. They create the "science" they want. Then they "report" it in their media outlets to certify it as "news."
Nice work, that.
The credibility of America's universities and major media outlets cannot possibly sink any lower.
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