On a steamy summer day inside the lecture auditorium of the storied National Institutes of Health headquarters, Dr. Michael Bracken delivered a stark message to an audience that dedicated its life, and owed its living, to medical research.
As much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient, the respected Yale University epidemiologist declared in a sobering assessment for a federal research agency that spends about $40 billion a year on medical studies.
He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.
“Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources,” Bracken preached to the audience back in July 2016, according to the NIH’s official account of the speech. “It can actually be harmful to people’s health.”
Nearly four years later, Bracken’s sweeping indictment about the financial management, organization and conduct of federal medical research looms large over a series of “what if” questions about the deadly and ever-spreading COVID-19 pandemic:
What if the research community hadn’t bet all its marbles on the next pandemic coming from a flu instead of a version of the coronavirus?
- What if NIH or other agencies had funded research into the efficacy of drugs like chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, and HIV cocktails that had shown promise against coronavirus dating back to 2003?
- What if more pressure had been applied by the medical governance world to develop vaccines aimed at coronavirus?
- What if the medical community had simply adjusted its outdated modeling that predicted coronavirus would spread slowly and could be contained to account for the massive growth in global air travel the last decade that transported this virus from China to the West in treacherously fast time?
As Dr. Carlos Del Rio, the Emory University infectious disease specialist and former CDC disease hunter, aptly noted: “There are multiple faults. And in the end, we were woefully...
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3 comments:
Nothing will happen , they will end up getting more money to waste. Our gelded repubs will see to it.
should some bureaucrat make it into jail for malfeasance or theft of the public's treasure by receiving, then there might be changes. getting paid for a study and not publishing? theft. knowingly funding a redundant program? theft. knowingly funding a public study which is garbage in the beginning and nonsense in the end? theft.
In answer to the questions you raise, it's worth mentioning that six months ago, the corona virus did not exist.
That said, you're right about worthless "medical research". Much of it has more to do with grant money than actual healthcare investigation. Didn't the NIH publish a big assed study about the evils of firearms in the home? How is that a medical issue?
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