According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.

To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."

> He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.

1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.

2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions.

3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.

Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...