The Health Sector Is in a Panic
Tom Woods

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a panic this week when it announced a pause in “study sections.”

Study sections, says Vinay Prasad, are “groups of mediocre scientists who decide which grants are funded.”

Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, is what I would describe as a moderate in the currently raging debates on various important health questions — he would not satisfy a lot of my readers overall, but he’s not a savage, he takes other perspectives seriously, and he treats dissident voices like yours and mine with respect.

His commentary on this subject is for that reason all the more valuable.

NIH, argues Prasad, “seeks mediocre ideas that tread along established lines and not highly novel views. It does a bad job of funding people who do truly transformational work…. Trump has paused study sections to allow future NIH director Jay Bhattacharya to revisit the priorities. This is completely normal and reasonable.”

After warning that the various woke priorities of the NIH are unlikely to survive a Trump presidency, Prasad notes that the “one type of diversity that NIH is not interested in funding is intellectual diversity. That’s probably a reason why they’ve had so much stagnation on intractable problems such as cancer and neurological conditions.”

To those who warn that the longer the pause goes on, the likelier it is that people will lose their research jobs, Prasad replies:

Some people say that if the pause, which is completely reasonable, continues, people will lose their jobs in research. Of course this is true. I suspect the pause will not continue for a great period of time, but, at the same time, some people in research need to lose their jobs.

The government cannot be a welfare program for everybody doing low quality, low credibility, irreproducible, low value of information research. It has to use public dollars in a wise way. That has absolutely not occurred in the past. A pause is necessary to tackle this intractable problem.

In many ways, Jay is the perfect person to tackle this problem. He’s not a laboratory scientist. He’s an economist. The difference between laboratory scientists and economists is that the latter are much better at thinking brutally and clearly about the trade-offs and expected payoffs of research. Jay has already been on record as saying he thinks the NIH is not willing to push the envelope. It doesn’t fund truly transformative work. I completely agree with him. And he should direct funding in that way….

And the American people that want the envelope pushed. They don’t want continued marginal drugs. They want new ideas. We have made no progress in Alzheimer’s disease in part because of the NIH’s dogmatism. I look forward to a renewed focus on a diversity of ideas in science research.

Finally, if academics want to take a sky is falling approach to every single thing Donald Trump does, they’re only going to exhaust themselves.

The issue here is not government science funding versus no government science funding. Episode #2400 of the Tom Woods Show, with Professor Terence Kealey, made the case for a complete separation of science and state.

I am saying here only that I think Prasad, who would not share my views on funding, is nevertheless correct that NIH bureaucrats have stifled scientific progress in the way they have allocated grant money.

Let’s see what happens under Jay.

 

 

Tom Woods is the winner of the 2019 Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award and the New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania. Get his truth-telling U.S. history courses for free at WoodsHistory.com.

 

 

 

 

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