On Thursday, Just The News posted an article about some of the things the National Institute of Health (NIH) is spending your tax money on.
The article reports:
On a steamy summer day inside the lecture auditorium of the storied National Institutes of Health headquarters, Dr. Michael Bracken delivered a stark message to an audience that dedicated its life, and owed its living, to medical research.
As much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient, the respected Yale University epidemiologist declared in a sobering assessment for a federal research agency that spends about $40 billion a year on medical studies.
He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.
The article notes where the NIH has spent money instead of researching cures for a coronavirus pandemic:
As you weigh that question, consider this: In the 15 years since evidence first emerged that drugs like chloroquine might help in a coronavirus pandemic, NIH spent:
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- $3.7 million so researchers at Oregon Health & Science University could compel monkeys to drink excessively to determine the impact of drunkenness on tissues, organs and central nervous systems.
- $3 million to study why lesbian women are likely to be two times more overweight than gay men.
- $700,107 for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam.
- $542,074 for a 12-episode soap opera on the love lives of HIV-infected patients.
- $3.54 million for a series of anti-obesity hip-hop songs to see if they would encourage kids to skip the fries and eat healthier.
- $35,000 for a University of Missouri study on whether text messaging college students before pre-football game tailgates would lead to less alcoholism.
- $350,000 for Yale University and Arizona State University to measure whether young adults between 21 and 30 would lose more money gambling if they drank alcohol.
- $721,000 for an Arizona company to develop a flight simulator to study drunken piloting.
Just two days ago, in the midst of surging coronavirus deaths in America, NIH released a joint study by its National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Aging that came to a heady conclusion: If you walk more, you are likely to live longer.
If the NIH had investigated chloroquine fifteen years ago, we might not have governors forbidding doctors to use it to treat coronavirus. It really is time to go through the federal budget line by line and get rid of stupid research projects and useless programs. We could probably pay for the stimulus package with what we cut and have money left over.