There’s a simple, terrible answer: because studies are hugely expensive, very time intensive, take a very long time to complete, and require multiple very slow iterations to get everything through committee in a way that our institutions will accept. Consider:
- Nobody is funding it. The cost is literally hundreds of millions of dollars to do in a way that the medical establishment would accept. Even then it would be challenged.
- It would take thousands of man hours. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- It would take 3+ years to get everything approved and done properly, otherwise the medical establishment won’t accept it. Actually they still probably won’t.
- By the time you’re done, it’s a virtual certainty that the virus will have run its course and the result will be useless.
IMO, the above is more than sufficient. The incentives were not there—or rather, the incentives were not sufficiently large to justify the cost and were further derated by the expected utility of the information a year after the pandemic is over.
There’s a simple, terrible answer: because studies are hugely expensive, very time intensive, take a very long time to complete, and require multiple very slow iterations to get everything through committee in a way that our institutions will accept. Consider:
- Nobody is funding it. The cost is literally hundreds of millions of dollars to do in a way that the medical establishment would accept. Even then it would be challenged.
- It would take thousands of man hours. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- It would take 3+ years to get everything approved and done properly, otherwise the medical establishment won’t accept it. Actually they still probably won’t.
- By the time you’re done, it’s a virtual certainty that the virus will have run its course and the result will be useless.
IMO, the above is more than sufficient. The incentives were not there—or rather, the incentives were not sufficiently large to justify the cost and were further derated by the expected utility of the information a year after the pandemic is over.
That leaves the question of why. Why was Fauci more interested in funding useless gain-of-function research than useful basic science like this?