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?
If you're willing to dismiss all companies as optimizing for more money, it seems only fair to say that academics optimize for prestige and publication in good journals.
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.
In most fields, our society relies on private industry to generate quality work, even when the work is very important and doing it wrong might kill people. I'm not an anarchist, I do recognize there are reasons that the government should provide some things. But the idea that private industry uniformly produces bad results because they don't care about anything but profit just seems silly to me. Producing good results is profitable!
> it seems only fair to say that academics optimize for prestige and publication in good journals.
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.
Authors aren't actually incentivized to find accurate results, but rather publishable results, which typically means novel. Researchers also cite articles based on their impact, not their veracity. There are plenty of instances of retracted results continuing to be cited as if they are still accurate.
There are issues with both industrial and academic research, but I do think that industrial research is more transparent in its motivations.
Everyone working for a living optimizes their work towards making more money. That doesn't change for people funded with public money. It's pretty widely accepted that the people in charge of public funding (politicians) sometimes act outside of the publics interest for self-gain.
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.