In the US alone depending on the year there are something between 10,000 and 60,000 flu deaths and a lot of additional harm due to people being ill. Whether or not pandemics are a concern it’s an important problem to deal with that.
There was money in pandemic preparedness. The Gates Foundation and organizations like CEPI were interested in it. They let themselves be conned by mRNA researchers and as a result funded mRNA research where there’s a good chance that it had net harm as it made us focus our vaccine trials on mRNA vaccines instead of focusing them on well-understand existing vaccine platforms that are easy to scale up and come with less side-effects.
The study from 2018 I referred is written in a way it is to advocate that part of this money goes into studying ivermectin for influenza. With the knowledge of hindsight that would have been more important.
In any case, my main point here is that what was prioritized (or was found to be valuable in Larry McEnerney terms) and what was important were two different things.
If you want to do important research and not just research that’s prioritized (found to be valuable by a particular community) it’s important to be able to mentally distinguish the two. Paradigm changing research for example generally isn’t valuable for the community that operates in an existing paradigm.
Sydney Brenner who was for example on of the people who started the molecular biology field is on record for saying that the kind of paradigm creating work back then would have been a hard time getting funded in today’s enviroment.
Given that there’s an efficient market as far as producing work that’s valued by established funders and not an efficient market for creating important work any researcher that actually wants to do important work and not just work that’s perceived as valuable has to keep the two apart. The efficient market hypothesis implies that most of the open opportunities to do important work are not seen as valuable by existing research communities.
In the US alone depending on the year there are something between 10,000 and 60,000 flu deaths and a lot of additional harm due to people being ill. Whether or not pandemics are a concern it’s an important problem to deal with that.
There was money in pandemic preparedness. The Gates Foundation and organizations like CEPI were interested in it. They let themselves be conned by mRNA researchers and as a result funded mRNA research where there’s a good chance that it had net harm as it made us focus our vaccine trials on mRNA vaccines instead of focusing them on well-understand existing vaccine platforms that are easy to scale up and come with less side-effects.
The study from 2018 I referred is written in a way it is to advocate that part of this money goes into studying ivermectin for influenza. With the knowledge of hindsight that would have been more important.
In any case, my main point here is that what was prioritized (or was found to be valuable in Larry McEnerney terms) and what was important were two different things.
If you want to do important research and not just research that’s prioritized (found to be valuable by a particular community) it’s important to be able to mentally distinguish the two. Paradigm changing research for example generally isn’t valuable for the community that operates in an existing paradigm.
Sydney Brenner who was for example on of the people who started the molecular biology field is on record for saying that the kind of paradigm creating work back then would have been a hard time getting funded in today’s enviroment.
Given that there’s an efficient market as far as producing work that’s valued by established funders and not an efficient market for creating important work any researcher that actually wants to do important work and not just work that’s perceived as valuable has to keep the two apart. The efficient market hypothesis implies that most of the open opportunities to do important work are not seen as valuable by existing research communities.