When bureaucracies ruled the world

Another perfect example of what happens when a bureaucracy is not managed correctly - from John Solomon at Just The News:

NIH failed to test coronavirus drugs, studied drunk monkeys, soap operas, and tailgating instead
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.

This was four years ago. Nothing has happened since:

“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  • What if the medical community had simply adjusted its outdated modeling that predicted coronavirus would spread slowly and could be contained to account for the massive growth in global air travel the last decade that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?

I do hope that heads will roll - this level of incompetence is stunning. This is what happens when you kick the can down the road. John has compiled a lit of what the NIH HAS been doing with our money (taxpayer dollars remember?)

• • $3.7 million so researchers at Oregon Health & Science University could compel monkeys to drink excessively to determine the impact of drunkenness on tissues, organs and central nervous systems. 
  • $3 million to study why lesbian women are likely to be two times more overweight than gay men.
  • $700,107 for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam. 
  • $542,074 for a 12-episode soap opera on the love lives of HIV-infected patients.
  • $3.54 million for a series of anti-obesity hip-hop songs to see if they would encourage kids to skip the fries and eat healthier. 
  • $35,000 for a University of Missouri study on whether text messaging college students before pre-football game tailgates would lead to less alcoholism.
  • $350,000 for Yale University and Arizona State University to measure whether young adults between 21 and 30 would lose more money gambling if they drank alcohol.
  • $721,000 for an Arizona company to develop a flight simulator to study drunken piloting.

Unreal. Much more at the site - it gets better (actually, not).