https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/01/thomas-woods/the-health-sector-is-in-a-panic/

The Health Sector Is in a Panic

By 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.” ......