Even in 2021, a million dollars is still a good bit of money. It’s worth musing on the fact that our recent “COVID” stimulus bill is equivalent to almost 2 million tranches of a million dollars. That is a mind-numbing amount of money. Yet in my case, it managed to miss out on an affordable, and potentially life-saving, researching product that really could have provided COVID relief.

Given the sheer size of the disbursement and the fact that it had the moniker “COVID” earmarked it (or more accurately, sanctified it) in its congressional passage, I was left feeling personally left out. For an affordable price, my colleagues and I could have made a legitimate contribution to COVID relief.

A month ago, two of my colleagues (at other medical universities) and I had jointly applied to the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) for a $150,000 grant to extend our collaborative studies on the effect of the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the lining of the lung. It was a small grant proposal but one that would have been sufficient for us to get the job done.

We were pursuing a unique line of investigation that a particular component of the virus was turning the lung lining into a colander. We had specific plans in place that made us believe that we would be able to counter that effect by using a unique therapeutic treatment. We’d already received two prior funded grants that had pushed our studies along and allowed us to fine-tune our hypothesis.

However, this time around, the NIH denied our latest grant proposal. Without that third bolus of money, it’s likely that we will no longer be able to pursue this line of investigation. If our theory is truly correct, then, one day, others will in time discover the same phenomenon that we were pursuing – but that may require many years. And of course, each of those years could involve a lot of preventable mortality, especially if a new COVID virus comes out of China in the near future.

I’ve been in the research game a long time. I’ve had my share of grant proposals go unfunded as well as funded. It comes with the territory. It was just that this particular rejection, because it coincided with the passage of this titanic spending bill, and because we were asking for such a small sum of money relative to the bill’s size -- and, I guess because we were targeting COVID itself -- stung more than others. I don’t fully know all the nooks and crannies that this just-passed COVID Relief Bill is being poured into, but I wanted to let folks know one place that it isn’t.

IMAGE: Research laboratory by Science in HD on Unsplash.