AP’s Borenstein Uses Tortured ‘Analysis’ to Estimate ‘Likely’ Deaths From VW’s Emissions Cheat
A story by Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press (“AP ANALYSIS: VW EVASION LIKELY LED TO DOZENS OF DEATHS”), originally published on Saturday but currently carrying a Monday morning time stamp, claims that “Volkswagen’s pollution-control chicanery” has been responsible for “killing between five and 20 people in the United States annually in recent years.” Those results, based on an AP “statistical and computer analysis,” “cleverly” recast the effort’s raw results of “somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over seven years.”
Given how poorly supposedly sacrosanct computer models have done in predicting “global warming” trends, and how gullible journalists, especially Borenstein, have been all these years about them, it seemed quite wise to treat his VW “analysis” with caution. In an op-ed at Investor’s Business Daily yesterday, Michael Fumento has demonstrated that such skepticism was warranted, and that the outrage over VW’s ruse, though wholly justified, is wildly out of proportion to the damage it has done.