Yeah really, why don't we leave out all modelling duties to companies who optimize for more money instead of leaving it with the only actor trying to optimize towards actual public health?
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
Whom would you like our society to rely on to generate quality work?
I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to this question. Public research becomes more and more of an industry every year with the publish-or-perish game, while a solely private solution is obviously open to very biased conclusions.
There is no smart solution to a stupid problem. But the truth is that _as an institution_ the NHS is the only actor whose mission is to optimize towards public health.
This is just not true. Military, police, courts? What does "most fields" even mean?
On one hand you have lots of people arguing that the legal duty of a company is only to make money for its shareholders. When large companies fail at that goal, it's bailout time.
On the other hand you have peer-reviewed journals where authors are incentivized to find accurate results, and researchers will cite articles on the basis of their veracity (or, if incorrect, as punching bags). Of course that's a fallible process and just as vulnerable to cronyism, but when researchers are caught cooking the books they're discredited, not rewarded.
There are issues with both industrial and academic research, but I do think that industrial research is more transparent in its motivations.
I make no claim as to which achieves better results for the public because it's such a complicated problem, but I think it's rather naive to just assume publicly funded incentives are more aligned with social health than private incentives.