<<<the actual data supports the theme he was pushing, so its at worst carelessness, there was no need to lie to make the point which the real data support.>>>
Here are the facts. You decide:
1. In his radio commercial, Guiliani said: “My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and, thank God, I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent. My chance of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent under socialized medicine.”
2. The Office for National Statistics in Britain says the five-year survival rate from prostate cancer there is 74.4 percent.
3. Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani, said yesterday that the 44 percent figure came from an article in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization.
4. That article, titled “The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care,” was written by Dr. David Gratzer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an adviser to the Giuliani campaign.
5. In an interview, Dr. Gratzer said the statistic came from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group in New York specializing in health care policy issues, but he acknowledged that it was seven years old and “crude.”
6. The Commonwealth Fund said yesterday that Dr. Gratzer had misused its research by calculating a five-year survival rate based on data on prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates in the United States and Britain.
“Five-year survival rates cannot be calculated from incidence and mortality rates, as any good epidemiologist knows,” the group said in a statement.
7. Asked if Mr. Giuliani would continue to repeat the statistic, and if the advertisement would continue to run, Ms. Comella responded by e-mail: “Yes. We will.”
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