Medical-evidence giant Cochrane battles funding cuts and closures

This may seem like bad news, but as a grad student studying evidence synthesis I can say that there is a silver lining here. The quality of studies in systematic inputs is low and even Cochrane&#x27;s reviews have been critiqued for missing things. It&#x27;s a big factory that hasn&#x27;t fundamentally innovated how research is synthesized. There are newer forms of synthesis like realist reviews, meta-modeling, and model-driven meta-analyses (those are just a few examples).<p>Hopefully this results in some innovation at the conceptual and financial levels. For those who lost their income, they have transferrable skills that would be welcomed in healthtech companies, other governmental groups, and academic positions. It&#x27;s really not as bad as it seems.

Dark public choice perspective: this is incentive compatible for pharmaceutical companies and governments who can now give out their guidelines and solutions without as strong scrutiny.<p>Too cynical??

Cochrane is kind of weird, though it probably is how frequentest science is supposed to work, where the null hypothesis is the default. If you actually followed their advice you would get vaccinated for hepatitis A every two years, because the protection lasting any longer is &quot;unsupported by high quality sources&quot;.

&gt; Cochrane says that the lost NIHR funding — around £4.2 million (US$5.3 million) — does not affect its core income, which was £8.9 million in 2022. However, a more existential threat looms. Around £6.8 million of that core income came from subscriptions to the Cochrane Library, but Cochrane aims to make all its reviews open access by 2025<p>What the actual fuck, those are peanuts for any single country or health care system. What a tragedy and a blow to evidence based medicine.