Anonymous ID: d00df0 Aug. 21, 2023, 7:37 a.m. No.19398768   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>9019 >>9230

NIH Is Due For An Overhaul After Covid Exposed Lies, Power Abuses, And Conflicts Of Interest

 

  • Fundamental Reforms

These conflicts of interest have seriously threatened the quality, integrity, and social effects of NIH research. The NIH requires fundamental reform. The NIH needs stronger conflict-of-interest rules: no more patent royalties for researchers, no more NIH leaders pontificating on matters of public health policy, no more “devastating takedowns” of other scientists, and no NIH research coordination with pharmaceutical companies. Instead, the NIH should actively encourage scientific debate and conduct research that transforms biomedicine and improves public health without imposing patent restrictions.

 

There must be a term limit for NIH leaders, with new leadership chosen from outside the NIH. These positions are too powerful to leave in the hands of a single person for decades. It is too easy for people in such positions to think of themselves as “the science” itself, surrounded as they are by people seeking NIH favor. Relatives of NIH leaders should not run the agency’s ethics infrastructure, as occurred during the pandemic. As science needs a regular infusion of new ideas, so does scientific leadership.

 

During the pandemic, the NIH failed in its mission to support medical and public health research because of its abuses of power and its conflicts of interest. Congress now has an opportunity to demand reforms so that the NIH better serves the American people in the future.

 

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/21/nih-is-due-for-an-overhaul-after-covid-exposed-lies-power-abuses-and-conflicts-of-interest/