Darrell Huff's style in How to Lie with Smoking Statistics was to marshal an army of minor quibbles to apparently undermine the entire body of research: find a

Darrell Huff's style in How to Lie with Smoking Statistics was to marshal an army of minor quibbles to apparently undermine the entire body of research: find a small flaw in one study, a minor error in another, and pretty soon you've made it appear like all the research is flawed. He didn't need to actually prove any one study wrong. He also relied pretty heavily on arguments that correlation is not causation because smokers are genetically predisposed to smoke, and may also be predisposed to cancer and other maladies. He even quoted R.A. Fisher's argument that people smoke to quell irritation and annoyance, and having a chronic inflammation or cancer might just be the kind of irritation that makes you subconsciously want to smoke. No number of enormous well-conducted observational studies would prevent Huff from making up scenarios for other types of confounding. Check out Chapter 12 of the book.