This was funny, from the weekend and the news that:
The leader of Britain's successful Covid vaccination programme has accused health officials of dismantling a critically important database, set up to aid Covid vaccine trials, when it could be used for other vital medical research programmes.
"All this talk about the UK becoming a serious science superpower is bollocks," Dame Kate Bingham told the Observer. "These people don't actually care. If you really want to make our clinical research strong, you don't start dismantling what's been put in place."
And:
The dramatic outburst by Bingham follows a decision by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to insist that volunteers who have already signed up to a national database of individuals willing to take part in medical research must now go through a complex, three-stage verification process to reapply to stay in the scheme.
Bingham, who described the NIHR's move as "ridiculous", said the database was set up in spring 2020 so that the UK had a pool of volunteers who were ready and waiting to be enrolled in trials once candidate Covid vaccines had been developed by researchers.
These volunteers, fully 94% of them, were willing to participate in other trials entirely separate from Covid.
But where is the surprise? All the rhetoric about a 'science superpower' was always just that, rhetoric. It doesn't mean anything because it was a tool, or weapon, to be utilised in furtherance of political aims rather than regarded as a good or an end in itself. And while this is funny, and a joke, the joke is on British people. Because in the wake of a pandemic that has such an injurious impact on lives and health and where the eventual outcome remains uncertain - sure, things are better than they were by far, but that may not always be the case - to dismantle this database speaks of no medium or long-term thinking even in respect of Covid. Let alone other medical research programmes.
Bingham argues that:
"The problem is that civil servants are focused on process not outcome," she told the Observer. "There are simpler ways of keeping all those volunteers on the database without making them go through this complex re-registration. It is straightforward: we should be investing in research infrastructure, not taking it apart."
But this isn't about civil servants, or not fundamentally, but rather political willingness to consider the long term. Without governments that are clear about considering that long term nothing (good) will happen.
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