Immediately seeing major problems with that study by Mangano & Sherman (M&S), I asked a statistician what he thought of it. He crunched the data and while he found several devastating statistical problems, his most remarkable finding was that the U.S. infant-death data M&S report as being from the CDC does not jibe with the actual CDC infant-death data for the same weeks.
The M&S infant-death data allegedly from the CDC can be seen here (go to Table 3, page 55). And the actual CDC infant-death data can be seen here (go to Locations, scroll down and select Total and press Submit for the data; the data for infants is in the Age column entitled “Less than 1”). The mismatching data sets are included at the end of this post, and with the links I’ve provided here, everything I’m saying can be independently confirmed by the reader.
Here are the mismatching data sets, note that post-Fuku weeks 15 through 24 do match:
2010 (weeks 50-52) 2011 (weeks 1-25)
wk M&S CDC
50 : 202 216
51 : 129 143
52 : 113 130
1 : 158 183
2 : 177 208
3 : 158 185
4 : 148 171
5 : 178 208
6 : 173 182
7 : 188 206
8 : 158 186
9 : 174 199
10 : 165 182
11 : 188 209
12 : 201 211
13 : 210 213
14 : 198 204
15 : 163 163
16 : 188 188
17 : 200 200
18 : 196 196
19 : 214 214
20 : 224 224
21 : 196 196
22 : 152 152
23 : 174 174
24 : 191 191
25 : 215 217
The nature of the mismatch is that all the pre-Fukushima M&S data points are lower than the actual CDC data points and bias the data set to to a statistically significant increase in post-Fukushima infant deaths. But in the actual CDC data, there is no statistically significant increase. The statistician also found that even M&S’s data for all-age deaths was in fact not statistically significant, contrary to the claim of M&S.
Why the infant data are mismatched is not understood at this time. However, a review of the archived copies of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report archive finds that the historically released data points for the weeks in question jibe with the CDC’s MMWR database. So I see no reason to believe the CDC’s online data are not the true data.