University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is the organisation that purported to perform research for the BBC's Panorama programme guestimating what effect minimum pricing would have on the population of England were a minimum price to be adopted.
Unfortunately, someone "fat-fingered their keyboard," which resulted in a massive overestimate of the potential number of Old Age Pensioners lives that would be saved by 3⅓ times, increasing the nebulous 1,150 lives 'saved' per year to 50,000 per decade (see what I did there?)
As a result, the BBC had to issue a correction on their news article[1], and had to pull the iPlayer version of Panorama to re-edit the program in light of the 'new' figures[2].
The Sheffield Alcohol Research Group of University of Sheffield, themselves claim
3,060 fewer deaths and 97,700 fewer hospital admissions in the tenth year after policy implementation[3]
So quite how the figure of 5,000 elderly lives saved per year from year one slipped out to be echoed via MSM passim, ad nauseum, and to sock-puppets such as www.minimumpricing.info[4] without peer-review, can only be imagined.
Explaining the correction, the BBC gives this as the reason they were told:
The University emphasised the human error was wholly on their part and has apologised unreservedly to the BBC.[2]
References
- ↑ Minimum alcohol price 'would save 11,500 pensioners' - The BBC
- ↑ a b Panorama - The BBC iPlayer WebCite archive
- ↑ The Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model (SAPM) - Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, University of Sheffield
- ↑ Minimum Pricing www.minimumpricing.info WebCite archive with 50,000 figure