To be fair, almost nobody considered a pandemic to be a serious possibility prior to 2020, so it is understandable that pandemic preparedness research was a low-priority area. There may be lots of open and answerable questions in unpopular topics, but if the topic is obscure, the payoff for making a discovery is small (in terms of reputation and recognition).
Of course, COVID-19 has proven to us that pandemic research is important, and immediately researchers poured in from everywhere to work on various facets of the problem (e.g., I even joined in an effort to build a ventilator simulator). The payoff increased, so the inefficiencies quickly disappeared.
Now you can argue that pandemic research should’ve been more prioritized before. That is obvious in hindsight but was not at all obvious in 2019. Out of the zillions of low-priority research areas that nobody cares about now, how will you decide which one will become important? Unless you have a time machine to see into the future, it remains a low-payoff endeavor.
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.
To be fair, almost nobody considered a pandemic to be a serious possibility prior to 2020, so it is understandable that pandemic preparedness research was a low-priority area. There may be lots of open and answerable questions in unpopular topics, but if the topic is obscure, the payoff for making a discovery is small (in terms of reputation and recognition).
Of course, COVID-19 has proven to us that pandemic research is important, and immediately researchers poured in from everywhere to work on various facets of the problem (e.g., I even joined in an effort to build a ventilator simulator). The payoff increased, so the inefficiencies quickly disappeared.
Now you can argue that pandemic research should’ve been more prioritized before. That is obvious in hindsight but was not at all obvious in 2019. Out of the zillions of low-priority research areas that nobody cares about now, how will you decide which one will become important? Unless you have a time machine to see into the future, it remains a low-payoff endeavor.
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.