Some good perspective here. Everyone is in favor of funding high-quality, productive, unbiased scientific research. Everyone should be against funding pseudoscience, unproductive administrative costs, excessive journal fees, etc. The public conversation should revolve around how to improve the ROI of the $50-100 billion the US spends annually on biomedical research, improving science communication, increasing viewpoint diversity, decreasing political influence and bias, and ensure all Americans can participate. Communicating the value of biomedical research to the public will be key - the community has become too insular and has taken public funding for granted. NIH now has the right leader for this job.
Dr. Prasad, the media is not wrong...they are doing what they'll always do. Push a narrative that fits the Leftist cult. Until independent media completely takes over and MSM becomes UTTERLY INSIGNIFICANT it won't change. Actually, lower than whale $hit insignificant. Every sector and segment comes from the general population. Military included. You'll have some patriots, some honorable people, some squared away, some losers, and some cultists. The real problem is that academia pools from the latter and not the former. Hence, it's only a matter of time. Academia are the Hapsburg's but they don't realize it yet.
Just saw a study from Spain that found the great majority of RSV hospitalizations were old people either from nursing homes or with major cardiac or pulmonary disease. The conclusion was that that should be our focus on vaccine campaigns. We knew that with the Covid pandemic, but the government health agencies pushed mass vaccination and suppressed contrary opinions. In that regard why didn't the FDA opt for phase 3 studies of the RNA vaccines in nursing home volunteers instead of wasting 6 months testing them on healthy people before making them available. The track record of the government scientists ain't that good.
I don't disagree about the usefulness of the majority of research, and whether funding could be better used in other arenas, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening here. Witness the dismantling of the department of education, decreased numbers of people monitoring food safety, focus on getting rid of any watchdog agency designed to catch rich people cheating on taxes, food industry lapsing in safety protocols or fucking over their workers.
Most of FAT/ obese US population have issues because of size and inflammation. Another large group of the supposedly not fat have one of the eating disorders-- NOW we have five. Why doesn't anyone say the truth here. Covid closedown was because of these fat folks.
One thing I have learned in the past several years is that it is nearly impossible to divorce politics from many things now. I think there were some really good ideas about DEI, but when politics infiltrated it, it became something that it probably wasn’t meant to be. Can you imagine if wild animals decided to do DEI? Unfortunately, we live in a dog eat dog world just like they do. I know my analogies kind of dumb because it harkened back to Snow White, the 1937 version. In my mind. And as I laughed to myself for the silliness of the analogy, it hit me that DEI has become like the current version. Anyway, it seems like as soon as politics become involved 50% of our crowd goes away. How do we do all of this without political influence?
You know what, this mostly makes sense to me. The problem is that whoever is doing the cutting hasn’t shared criteria for what gets cut with the American public. Media hysteria or not, the public thinks “cutting cancer research” sounds pretty bad. I don’t think that will change until the cutters (DOGE? Dr. Jay? Someone else?) lay their cards on the table and explain the rationale for deciding which research we can do without. Until that happens, I think I might just continue #resisting.
Some good perspective here. Everyone is in favor of funding high-quality, productive, unbiased scientific research. Everyone should be against funding pseudoscience, unproductive administrative costs, excessive journal fees, etc. The public conversation should revolve around how to improve the ROI of the $50-100 billion the US spends annually on biomedical research, improving science communication, increasing viewpoint diversity, decreasing political influence and bias, and ensure all Americans can participate. Communicating the value of biomedical research to the public will be key - the community has become too insular and has taken public funding for granted. NIH now has the right leader for this job.
Dr. Prasad, the media is not wrong...they are doing what they'll always do. Push a narrative that fits the Leftist cult. Until independent media completely takes over and MSM becomes UTTERLY INSIGNIFICANT it won't change. Actually, lower than whale $hit insignificant. Every sector and segment comes from the general population. Military included. You'll have some patriots, some honorable people, some squared away, some losers, and some cultists. The real problem is that academia pools from the latter and not the former. Hence, it's only a matter of time. Academia are the Hapsburg's but they don't realize it yet.
Just saw a study from Spain that found the great majority of RSV hospitalizations were old people either from nursing homes or with major cardiac or pulmonary disease. The conclusion was that that should be our focus on vaccine campaigns. We knew that with the Covid pandemic, but the government health agencies pushed mass vaccination and suppressed contrary opinions. In that regard why didn't the FDA opt for phase 3 studies of the RNA vaccines in nursing home volunteers instead of wasting 6 months testing them on healthy people before making them available. The track record of the government scientists ain't that good.
pharma could care less about antibiotic research but there's a bigly need for some new ones, that says a lot.
One of your many best.
Love the subtitle.
I don't disagree about the usefulness of the majority of research, and whether funding could be better used in other arenas, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening here. Witness the dismantling of the department of education, decreased numbers of people monitoring food safety, focus on getting rid of any watchdog agency designed to catch rich people cheating on taxes, food industry lapsing in safety protocols or fucking over their workers.
Most of FAT/ obese US population have issues because of size and inflammation. Another large group of the supposedly not fat have one of the eating disorders-- NOW we have five. Why doesn't anyone say the truth here. Covid closedown was because of these fat folks.
One thing I have learned in the past several years is that it is nearly impossible to divorce politics from many things now. I think there were some really good ideas about DEI, but when politics infiltrated it, it became something that it probably wasn’t meant to be. Can you imagine if wild animals decided to do DEI? Unfortunately, we live in a dog eat dog world just like they do. I know my analogies kind of dumb because it harkened back to Snow White, the 1937 version. In my mind. And as I laughed to myself for the silliness of the analogy, it hit me that DEI has become like the current version. Anyway, it seems like as soon as politics become involved 50% of our crowd goes away. How do we do all of this without political influence?
You know what, this mostly makes sense to me. The problem is that whoever is doing the cutting hasn’t shared criteria for what gets cut with the American public. Media hysteria or not, the public thinks “cutting cancer research” sounds pretty bad. I don’t think that will change until the cutters (DOGE? Dr. Jay? Someone else?) lay their cards on the table and explain the rationale for deciding which research we can do without. Until that happens, I think I might just continue #resisting.