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  • New Zealand Listener

    An INEXACT SCIENCE

    Mar 20, 2022 8 minutes
    by PAUL GORMAN

    It was a controversial decision by those holding the purse strings at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a special funding round, the Health Research Council announced grants worth $3.8 million for 13 Covid studies. Among them were two university-based trials that included genomic sequencing of the virus.

    Genomic sequencing, as we all now know, is vital to understanding how a virus such as Covid is spreading. But according to those behind another study, New Zealand missed a chance to invest in more expensive equipment that held much more potential to quickly generate national-level data.

    Instead, the HRC’s biggest bet, totalling $1.36 million, was placed on a trifecta of trials using hydroxychloroquine, a drug used for malaria and some autoimmune conditions that was later famously championed by Donald Trump when he was US president.

    Within months, hopes for hydroxychloroquine faded and the three New Zealand trials were abandoned.

    Was it a spectacular blunder? Some Kiwi scientists see it that way, and claim the research funding lottery is just one of the handbrakes holding back New Zealand’s progress on many fronts.

    Agencies and scientists are competing, sometimes aggressively. The winners take all and the losers emigrate.

    As it happened, the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) and the University of Otago eventually succeeded in winning

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