UK Government announces £800m boost to support innovation and improve patient safety

https://www.pmlive.com/pharma_news/...innovation_and_improve_patient_safety_1456936

eta: see also
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/new-mul...iscoveries-into-treatments-for-patients/31653

(includes list of NIHR Biomedical Research Centres 2022-2027 )

 

I had a look through each NIHR's research themes and not one of them looks at post viral conditions, Long Covid or ME/CFS or anything else close. About the closest you get is infections, neurology and multimorbidity but none of these is looking into our condition or similar at all. Those looking at Covid19 are vaccinations and diagnostics and treatments not Long Covid. Worse is perhaps a good 10 of them have direct themes on Psychology and mental health. This funding I think will set us back yet further, it fuels the opposition. I hope I am wrong.

 

Darn. Biological reductionism strikes again. *BPSers shake fist angrily at the universe*

It's weird how the people who talk about "biological reductionism" in medicine apply it to the whole of biology, which is gigantic, but not at the extremely flimsy thinking of "those tests here all show negative results and that it means it's literally not biological", which is actual biological reductionism. Even more so that this weak argument has existed since before every single test currently in use today was developed, let alone used in standard practice.

 

This sounds like a scramble to find ways to reduce costs from litigation when things go wrong - which will be most of the time for the foreseeable future. It is likely to be commerce-led and poorly evidenced. If this was real biomedical research it would be funded by MRC.

 

I do love the trick of announcing new funding by press releasing an £800m headline, and fudging the amount allocated in the fourth round. Never gets old.

 

The NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre has 20 themes but the other centres appear to have fewer but different themes. NIHR is funding research into post acute Covid sequalae: Research into long COVID and of course NIHR is part funding DecodeME. Also important to remember that NIHR is not the only source of health research in the UK, there is also the MRC