The US went all in on vaccines. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the US didn't fund more academic R&D; that's the MO I expected during that administration.
I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.
Much like The Fed provided public and private debt support, these applications are more pork for existing investigators with deep knowledge of the NIH bureaucracy, but sadly likely of little relevance to the larger issue.
I will say the drug repurposing landscape was an absolute fiasco last year. Every funding opportunity wanted reams of data supporting use in COVID19 which takes time to generate. Yet, somehow on-patent anti-IL-6 drugs were tried again and again and again even in the absence of elevated IL-6.
UK and the NHS really got this right by centralizing repurposing efforts. In the US, there aren't more than ~50 experts in drug repurposing. Why didn't HHS/CDC round them up, lock them in a room, and have to rank-order molecules for proposed basket repurposing trials? We could have saved ~10-100k lives in the US with better drugs for early- and mid-stage disease, but nobody wants to fund a drug that can't generate an ROI. Truly a market, and institutional, failure here.