PRIME MINISTER SHOULD DITCH THE "SNAKE OIL SQUAD"

by PAUL AMATIO

The Covid 19 research team (a.k.a  Snake Oil Squad) has received massive funding from the State at a time when money is scarce and hard to come by at all corners of the state institutions to keep functioning effectively. 

We have seen photos of hospitals where patients are lining up or sleeping on the floor due to no medicine. Cancer patients are dying from lack of a cobalt machine (I read somewhere it only costs K30 thousand) and people with TB and other diseases are also suffering from lack of medication.

Yet we have a team here that has gone above and beyond what other scientists and medical researchers around the world with decades of experience behind them and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lab equipment, support staff and computer generation power behind them have been unable to do over the last 6 months. Truly a miracle.

I watched the TV interview as posted on Facebook and from what i could gather, the proponents of this "breakthrough" stated very clearly that what they have done is researched through some 30,000 drugs and in a process of elimination, they have identified 10 that can actually work against the virus. Hmmmm.

That's good detective work so I can follow that.  My doubts started when one of them started calling on the name of God and the other went on to mispronounce the titles of the PM. And then he went on to say categorically that the wont be looking at fresh cures (kept throwing in Baimuru). The mumbo jumbo about the Take Back PNG slogan which no-one hardly believes now anyway was a total giveaway. In actual fact, I did not really see anything scientific about that presentation.

Now as a layman, I would have thought that the process to follow would have been:- (1) conduct the investigative research into the efficacy of the drugs using  computer simulation (2) prepare a scientific or medical paper on that (3) register your company and have the intellectual work owned by that company (4) have the papers submitted to a peer review board (5) upon passing by that board, it would be sent to a scientific or medical journal for publication (6) take the publication to the PM and ask for funding or take it to a big pharma company and they will be more than willing to fund your work because the combination of drugs can be re-designed using their facilities to come up with a completely new drug which can then be patented and used for human trials. In this case, it appears that this whole check and balance process was one away with and they wet direct to the PM for money. Not even the IMR was allowed to peer-review this work.

Personally I think its a con job for a fast buck and the Prime Minister should have taken advise from established experts before deciding on and committing any money to this. This has tarnished the reputation of the nation, the PM and the office of the PM.

Coming on top of other revelations about the PM including the fact that the Prime Minister personally wrote to the Speaker of Parliament to withhold and delay gazettal of two amendments to laws that will abolish the position of Chief Secretary, it now makes me question whose intersts this whole thing is about. Several text messages have been doing the rounds on WhatsApp with names of ministrs and the PM on it suggesting that the means to the 2022 Natel is the money from the Covid 19 fight.

For anyone wondering why this was not put through the normal tender processes of State, just remember that the Covid 19 Act has not been repealed so the PM can legally bypass this process under that Act. Has anyone seen the latest audit report on that yet? Our scientific auditor cum election manager cum police operations commander cum corruption fighter has not presented that yet - despite public promises to do so. It would be interesting to see his thoughts on this "scientific" and "medical" breakthrough. But I forget that he is police minister, not health minister! In that case, then why is the Health Secretary not the controller for the Covid 19 SOE?

I am sorry to say that I am starting to lose faith in our Prime Minister and I am certain many others also are heading the same way. We were looking forward to change after the last change of government, not more of the same.