There is a bigger iceberg lurking around. Look up the people who control medical school accreditation and funding. They have more blood on hands than many other industries put together. Medical innovation has been slowed down by magnitudes because of their gatekeeping.
It’s not just medical schools but the entire pipeline from there into professional accreditation by limiting residency programs working with Congress to cap them as part of Medicare legislation / funding. It’s only recently that the AMA agreed to lift the spots.
There’s a lot of reasons that the US has to keep importing in doctors and nurses at lower end of market rates while our medical costs as a system soar into unaffordability and bleed into increasing costs for every single other private sector possible. If Big Oil did this they’d be practicing racketeering and price gouging in the open.
More specifically pseudo science not guided by empiricism. The line between science and pseudo science is very thin. Scientific theories are often incorrect, especially in life science, but we refine upon them based in empirical and observed data.
There is a bottleneck in the number of MD positions. Without the MD title, your typical life science researcher cannot easily carry out medical research. Medical education and training has a scale problem.
To conduct good clinical research, I think you need to understand the constraints of clinical practice. It's not only a matter of holding the title, but more of practical experience.
You do need someone with the clinical experience to understand the questions that need asking and to confirm the trends and suspicions seen in clinical practice, but clinical academics are expensive, and also terrible at stats and good research practice. I think the right mix of both is important.
The best C and C++ package manager I have used is Xmake/Xrepo. They support all the major package repositories out of the box including Vcpkg and Conan.
Human trials for drugs is the expensive part. If the situation is urgent, look into compassionate use and right to try. If you have time, the fastest way to get it to production is to have the trials done in a lower cost country. At the end of the day if you control the experiment and manufacturing pipeline, then you can make a develop a drug for a much lower price. You absolutely cannot cut corners in the experimental and engineering stage even if you do it in a more compliant regulatory regime.
I haven't looked into the Moderna vaccine but in general there are many ways to get rid of a virus. Using the typical B cell + viral glycoprotein is the most obvious way as viral activity is hard to detect when replicating inside a cell but there are many stages in the viral replication process which can be inhibited. Inhibiting protease cleavage of the viral polyprotein or preventing polymerase formation are all possible solutions. They don't really count as vaccines though.
Fwiw, rarely can lab designed viruses i.e. made through splicing have features that are more "optimal" (or efficient) than those that are evolved. Directed evolution is truly marvelous when done properly (it won a Nobel!).
