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@mattyglesias hits it out of the park this morning with a post of the US' COVID response. I second every word but as a wonky academic I want to add a few of my own. [1/10] https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-optimism-about-americas-covid
Vaccines and their distribution will take center stage, and so they should. But the broader innovation story is that we ran a marathon with superpowers that propelled us to the 20 mile marker. [2/10]
PCR, monoclonal antibodies, structural biology (to name a few) are mature technologies today in large part because of massive and sustained funding of fundamental research in various subfields of biology over the past 50 years. [3/10]
And the NIH and NSF, often criticized (not always wrongly!) for their bureaucratic processes, glacial pace of change, and stultifying middle-management should get a massive amounts of credit for helping us get there. [4/10]
How many Americans have heard of Thomas Brock's "unlikely bacteria"? The NSF-supported discovery—in Yellowstone National Park—of a bacteria that retains its enzymatic properties under extremely different temperature conditions might well have been singled out...[5/10]
![How many Americans have heard of Thomas Brock's "unlikely bacteria"? The NSF-supported discovery—in Yellowstone National Park—of a bacteria that retains its enzymatic properties under extremely different temperature conditions might well have been singled out...[5/10]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnRPU4jXcAM7bXq.jpg "How many Americans have heard of Thomas Brock's \"unlikely bacteria\"? The NSF-supported discovery—in Yellowstone National Park—of a bacteria that retains its enzymatic properties under extremely different temperature conditions might well have been singled out...[5/10]")
...as an exemplar of wasteful scientific spending. Until Kary Mullis and the Cetus Corporation leveraged its unusual properties to develop the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in the late 1980s. [6/10]
![...as an exemplar of wasteful scientific spending. Until Kary Mullis and the Cetus Corporation leveraged its unusual properties to develop the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in the late 1980s. [6/10]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnRPbrRWMAEWKTS.jpg "...as an exemplar of wasteful scientific spending. Until Kary Mullis and the Cetus Corporation leveraged its unusual properties to develop the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in the late 1980s. [6/10]")
Life scientists are better place than me to provide other instances where the value of particular research results may not have appeared initially obvious, but have paid off, bigly, in the current pandemic. [7/10]
On the negative side of the ledger, the US academic medical community (and NIH) failed to orchestrate large scale randomized trials for various bedside interventions early in the pandemic. [8/10]
The RECOVERY trial of dexamethasone in hospitalized patients stands out both not only because of its impact on practice but also because one cannot point out to a US-equivalent, in spite of a massive funding advantage, relative to UK institutions. [8/10] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/10EJMoa2021436
Instead we had a slew of badly-designed single center studies that smacked of "far west medicine" (in the words of @VPrasadMDMPH) [9/10]
This failure is very redolent of the wider societal failures (in mass testing, contact tracing, mask wearing, etc.) that Yglesias notes at the start of his excellent essay. [10/10]
Also apparently I cannot count to 10.
