Every base commander regularly meets with their Public Affairs personnel and will often attend public events in the local region their base is in. The funding is not directly tied to their public perception, sure, but there is a causal chain that every O-6 and above is well aware of.
> No, it's not sad that you need to justify the use of public money.
You don't ask your plumber which computer network you should build for a fortune 500 company for the same reason I don't ask a computer programmer how to fix leaky pipes. People who study in an area actually have much stronger basis for having opinions rather than keyboard warriors who are upset that there mythological studies have been debunked time and time again. That's not science that is cult behavior. If you want to influence that decision process work in that field and provide justifications for that vaccine research and some new angle that's been missed. The American public is not a intelligent member of the medical community there opinion should not have the same weight in day to day operations as the medical community. They can allocate an amount we want to do research and should ask the NIH to do board research because that is effective and has an overwhelmingly strong record having done the background research for basically ever medical advancement made for a long long time.
So, no I think we should allow a panel of experts to evaluate what is worth funding in research. Give the NIH a budget to hire a panel of field experts like they have been for a long time and fund research that panel says is worth it. Autism and vaccine linkage is studied and has been shown several times to have no strong correlation with vaccination. The idea we need to study that more is stupid and experts say it is stupid because it steals funding from actual research into other environmental factors that haven't been studied yet. Maybe its PFAS chemicals maybe its something else.
That's a fantastic way to fall victim to grift. Your "panel of experts" can easily be as biased as anyone else.
When you give people vast authority on the basis of their expertise (even assuming the expertise is genuine), anything that challenges it becomes not a novel idea worth exploring, but a direct challenge to their authority.
Planck's principle- that science advances one funeral at a time- is rather apropos here.
