Most importantly: universities are supposed to have tenure.
Tenure is not supposed to be a 'free ride'. Tenure is supposed to give academics the power to speak the truth as a minority opinion without fear of retribution from the government (their employer), including against that government.
If you are funded by tax dolllars, you are de facto a public servant. Yet, the majority academics of academics are self-obsessed careerists. At best, you have virtue signallers and ideologues, with their 'listening sessions' and (always cisgendered) pronouns at the end of their signatures, who are unwilling to take risks for the things they really believe. Why? They have no other choice; it means the difference between having a job or not in a publish-or-perish, cut-throat world.
Academics are *supposed* to be the ones holding the government accountable when non-experts cannot speak to the issues at hand; instead you have thousands of leftist academics betraying the public and calling everyone who disagrees with them 'populists'. On top of the ideological blinders, finally, you have nothing but a system of toxic apologia, because tenure is all about ... funding.
The article referenced can be found here [0], and for those wondering if "A proponent of unproven covid testing was told he was discouraged from commenting about the pandemic when he worked at a university (before switching to a company)" was in fact Michael Mina, spoiler: yes.
And this raises a side question - how in the hell is Michael Mina's reputation not demolished after two years of ridiculous claims which were immediately disproven.
Here's a guy who was given favorable (if not fawning) coverage from Time Magazine, arguing that his rapid test plan could crush Covid because "Countries like Slovakia and the United Kingdom are currently utilizing mass rapid antigen testing programs and already seeing great success." [1]
This article was posted on November 17th, 2020, and apparently no one at Time let alone Michael Mina thought they should check Our World In Data to see if cases were dropping in those countries as claimed (spoiler, they were not [2]), nor did he nor Time issue an apology after cases skyrocketed after that article was published admitting that the idea had now been clearly falsified.
No, he continued to argue for his pseudoscience for the next two years (the cynic me wonders if the fact he worked for a company selling tests might have something to do with it?) and the media continued to give him a platform to peddle his wares [3].
You would think that after Michael Mina caught Covid January 2022, and saw first-hand that the daily tests he took didn't turn positive before symptoms hit (which was the claim he used to justify testing of asymptomatic people - the tests would alert you before you get sick), he might rethink his position.
At the very least, once he became sick and the tests were still negative first 12 hours he would finally realize what Slovakia and the UK realized 2 years earlier - these don't make a difference. [4]
(At least he repeated the vows correctly: "we are finding, which isn't very surprising, is that the vaccines, despite our great hopes around them, just aren't actually performing as well as we had hoped to stop transmission. I want to be very clear that the greatest benefit, and the greatest thing we could ask for of a vaccine, is that they stop people from going to the hospital. And so they're doing a really good job at that.")
I joke that I determined about 4 weeks into my Ph.D. program, that academia was not going to be my career path. But really, it was not too much longer than that. I encountered so much entrenched dogma among the faculty, and as I began publishing, among journal reviewers. I saw professors entrenched in failing hypotheses that they had been pursuing for 20 + years. Funding required continual grant applications, and if you actually suggested something new and creative the dogmatic grant reviewers would shut you down. It just struck me as that the creativity and critical thinking I yearned for was not really fostered and nurtured in the academic setting. Fast forward ahead, and what I have seen in my 15+ years in indusrty is that financial drivers (while not perfect) result in innovation. Accountability to boards and investors requires you prove it there is merit to your hypothese, that you are pursuing data that can best support your program. I have seen this go bad as well, but other than the big boys like Pfizer, this seems to be the exception and not the rule. Dead ideas die a quick death and good ideas move forward. If we could ever extricate the regulators from the grasp of big pharma, product development would improve exponentially. I don't see how that spirit of innovation and creativity gets translated back into the University setting and encouraged when it seems the entire institution of academia has become so much more political than scientific.
The underlying issue is close to that expressed here, but perhaps an essential point is still missed. If one is working at a pharma, one expects to not be in the business of going out and exposing that their drug is not working as intended (to be kind) or worse, killing people. (One can do a lot of that internally until fired, or quit, but one would not expect to do it as a paid employee.)
But working at a University, with tenure in some cases, the WHOLE IDEA is to have intellectual and academic freedom to express ideas (social, scientific, whatever) without censure and with encouragement that in the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas will win. In today's academia (and "I are one") there are so many off-limits topics I cannot even count them. Of course, in California it is now illegal (2098 be thanked) to tell the truth about Covid which will, in the end, kill who knows how many people while Newsom chuckles. But actually telling the truth about covid, if not 100% compliant with the government diktat, is verboten most everywhere in academia...Vinay is a rare exception and only because he brings so much overhead to the university (have you seen his grants list?). Truth about the horror of medical school admissions (now virtually all demographic/social justice warrior score based rather than capacity-to-practice/caring based) or the dumbing down (no more grades anywhere...not even on boards) of curricula because the enrollees under the new social justice acceptance rubric cannot keep up with the medical curriculum we had just a few years ago) is also a verboten topic.
In short, there is a long list of woke/governmental topics that academia censors more strongly than most companies censor their employees when speaking about that company's products. So why not go to a company and have a better life? The good things one was expecting in academia are no longer there, and that is entirely self inflicted.
We need more basic research into diet and lifestyle medicine. This should be the focus of NIH grants, to elucidate the basic science of human health and flourishing. Our overweening focus on treatment comes at the expense of innovation in the direction of prevention. Pharma has captured the establishment in complex ways. Academe used to and can still be playing a central role in basic research. We need to stop taxpayer funding of drug discovery thru academe, especially sickcare drugs that have little to no benefit and for conditions that are almost entirely preventable. Let’s investigate health in complex systems instead, and focus our efforts on enabling personalized prevention through healthy living incentives. Until we pay for the privilege of mistreating our own bodies today, to cover the costs we will invite tomorrow, we won’t have a healthcare system, it will simply remain a world class sickcare system. And a sick population has lots of demand for a promise and a hope. Modern day snake oil salesmen run the establishment now and prey effectively on that hope, feeding like vampires on our collective lifestyle disease.
Reform it from the top, no more hierarchically inclined career bureaucrats like Collins, let’s democratize the grant making process. Decentralize and nullify.
I would submit that oncology -- Vinay's field -- might have the greatest enmeshment with Pharma. I spent my career in Pediatrics and my speciality was pulmonology. I can remember less than 3% of colleagues in my 40+ year career who joined the pharmaceutical industry. I never experienced any hustle or undue pressure from the two partners who left the sections where I worked. I saw them at international meetings and the relationships were friendly and included no pharmaceutical overtures.
Cystic fibrosis is a major disease for pediatric pulmonologists and, for sure, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) has had a strong relationship with various pharmaceutical companies that developed and marketed drugs for CF. Most recently, the product Trikafta has had a huge impact on the severity of complications related to CF. The CFF has been rewarded with huge financial dividends from the contractual relationship it worked out with major pharmaceutical companies. It has allowed the CFF to expand its infrastructure and to sponsor more research. I have not heard of any 'under the table' pressures or rewards for the pediatric pulmonologists in the field.
As Alex Berenson has shown, I think that sunshine with frank discussions, honoring all legitimate questions and raising ethical standards is the right way to go. Medical schools and academic hospitals must maintain transparency and ethical norms.
Most importantly: universities are supposed to have tenure.
Tenure is not supposed to be a 'free ride'. Tenure is supposed to give academics the power to speak the truth as a minority opinion without fear of retribution from the government (their employer), including against that government.
If you are funded by tax dolllars, you are de facto a public servant. Yet, the majority academics of academics are self-obsessed careerists. At best, you have virtue signallers and ideologues, with their 'listening sessions' and (always cisgendered) pronouns at the end of their signatures, who are unwilling to take risks for the things they really believe. Why? They have no other choice; it means the difference between having a job or not in a publish-or-perish, cut-throat world.
Academics are *supposed* to be the ones holding the government accountable when non-experts cannot speak to the issues at hand; instead you have thousands of leftist academics betraying the public and calling everyone who disagrees with them 'populists'. On top of the ideological blinders, finally, you have nothing but a system of toxic apologia, because tenure is all about ... funding.
The article referenced can be found here [0], and for those wondering if "A proponent of unproven covid testing was told he was discouraged from commenting about the pandemic when he worked at a university (before switching to a company)" was in fact Michael Mina, spoiler: yes.
And this raises a side question - how in the hell is Michael Mina's reputation not demolished after two years of ridiculous claims which were immediately disproven.
Here's a guy who was given favorable (if not fawning) coverage from Time Magazine, arguing that his rapid test plan could crush Covid because "Countries like Slovakia and the United Kingdom are currently utilizing mass rapid antigen testing programs and already seeing great success." [1]
This article was posted on November 17th, 2020, and apparently no one at Time let alone Michael Mina thought they should check Our World In Data to see if cases were dropping in those countries as claimed (spoiler, they were not [2]), nor did he nor Time issue an apology after cases skyrocketed after that article was published admitting that the idea had now been clearly falsified.
No, he continued to argue for his pseudoscience for the next two years (the cynic me wonders if the fact he worked for a company selling tests might have something to do with it?) and the media continued to give him a platform to peddle his wares [3].
You would think that after Michael Mina caught Covid January 2022, and saw first-hand that the daily tests he took didn't turn positive before symptoms hit (which was the claim he used to justify testing of asymptomatic people - the tests would alert you before you get sick), he might rethink his position.
At the very least, once he became sick and the tests were still negative first 12 hours he would finally realize what Slovakia and the UK realized 2 years earlier - these don't make a difference. [4]
Nope! He keeps on pushing his failed hypothesis!
___________________________________
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02088-4
[1] https://time.com/5912705/covid-19-stop-spread-christmas/
[2] https://imgur.com/a/F31a5CV
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/slovakia
[3] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/michael-mina
(At least he repeated the vows correctly: "we are finding, which isn't very surprising, is that the vaccines, despite our great hopes around them, just aren't actually performing as well as we had hoped to stop transmission. I want to be very clear that the greatest benefit, and the greatest thing we could ask for of a vaccine, is that they stop people from going to the hospital. And so they're doing a really good job at that.")
[4] https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1483116982048329734
3rd tweet down, casually admits that all the rapid tests were negative the first 12 hours of symptoms. Whoops!
I joke that I determined about 4 weeks into my Ph.D. program, that academia was not going to be my career path. But really, it was not too much longer than that. I encountered so much entrenched dogma among the faculty, and as I began publishing, among journal reviewers. I saw professors entrenched in failing hypotheses that they had been pursuing for 20 + years. Funding required continual grant applications, and if you actually suggested something new and creative the dogmatic grant reviewers would shut you down. It just struck me as that the creativity and critical thinking I yearned for was not really fostered and nurtured in the academic setting. Fast forward ahead, and what I have seen in my 15+ years in indusrty is that financial drivers (while not perfect) result in innovation. Accountability to boards and investors requires you prove it there is merit to your hypothese, that you are pursuing data that can best support your program. I have seen this go bad as well, but other than the big boys like Pfizer, this seems to be the exception and not the rule. Dead ideas die a quick death and good ideas move forward. If we could ever extricate the regulators from the grasp of big pharma, product development would improve exponentially. I don't see how that spirit of innovation and creativity gets translated back into the University setting and encouraged when it seems the entire institution of academia has become so much more political than scientific.
The underlying issue is close to that expressed here, but perhaps an essential point is still missed. If one is working at a pharma, one expects to not be in the business of going out and exposing that their drug is not working as intended (to be kind) or worse, killing people. (One can do a lot of that internally until fired, or quit, but one would not expect to do it as a paid employee.)
But working at a University, with tenure in some cases, the WHOLE IDEA is to have intellectual and academic freedom to express ideas (social, scientific, whatever) without censure and with encouragement that in the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas will win. In today's academia (and "I are one") there are so many off-limits topics I cannot even count them. Of course, in California it is now illegal (2098 be thanked) to tell the truth about Covid which will, in the end, kill who knows how many people while Newsom chuckles. But actually telling the truth about covid, if not 100% compliant with the government diktat, is verboten most everywhere in academia...Vinay is a rare exception and only because he brings so much overhead to the university (have you seen his grants list?). Truth about the horror of medical school admissions (now virtually all demographic/social justice warrior score based rather than capacity-to-practice/caring based) or the dumbing down (no more grades anywhere...not even on boards) of curricula because the enrollees under the new social justice acceptance rubric cannot keep up with the medical curriculum we had just a few years ago) is also a verboten topic.
In short, there is a long list of woke/governmental topics that academia censors more strongly than most companies censor their employees when speaking about that company's products. So why not go to a company and have a better life? The good things one was expecting in academia are no longer there, and that is entirely self inflicted.
We need more basic research into diet and lifestyle medicine. This should be the focus of NIH grants, to elucidate the basic science of human health and flourishing. Our overweening focus on treatment comes at the expense of innovation in the direction of prevention. Pharma has captured the establishment in complex ways. Academe used to and can still be playing a central role in basic research. We need to stop taxpayer funding of drug discovery thru academe, especially sickcare drugs that have little to no benefit and for conditions that are almost entirely preventable. Let’s investigate health in complex systems instead, and focus our efforts on enabling personalized prevention through healthy living incentives. Until we pay for the privilege of mistreating our own bodies today, to cover the costs we will invite tomorrow, we won’t have a healthcare system, it will simply remain a world class sickcare system. And a sick population has lots of demand for a promise and a hope. Modern day snake oil salesmen run the establishment now and prey effectively on that hope, feeding like vampires on our collective lifestyle disease.
Reform it from the top, no more hierarchically inclined career bureaucrats like Collins, let’s democratize the grant making process. Decentralize and nullify.
I would submit that oncology -- Vinay's field -- might have the greatest enmeshment with Pharma. I spent my career in Pediatrics and my speciality was pulmonology. I can remember less than 3% of colleagues in my 40+ year career who joined the pharmaceutical industry. I never experienced any hustle or undue pressure from the two partners who left the sections where I worked. I saw them at international meetings and the relationships were friendly and included no pharmaceutical overtures.
Cystic fibrosis is a major disease for pediatric pulmonologists and, for sure, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) has had a strong relationship with various pharmaceutical companies that developed and marketed drugs for CF. Most recently, the product Trikafta has had a huge impact on the severity of complications related to CF. The CFF has been rewarded with huge financial dividends from the contractual relationship it worked out with major pharmaceutical companies. It has allowed the CFF to expand its infrastructure and to sponsor more research. I have not heard of any 'under the table' pressures or rewards for the pediatric pulmonologists in the field.
As Alex Berenson has shown, I think that sunshine with frank discussions, honoring all legitimate questions and raising ethical standards is the right way to go. Medical schools and academic hospitals must maintain transparency and ethical norms.