Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Fomite 4196 days ago
The "small pilot" was a 40 center study enrolling 1,750 pregnant women. There are some fixed costs to a study like that, especially if they're supposed to also apply to the larger study, and there has been a lot of work done in developing the appropriate methods for the NCS - over 100 research papers worth of it.

Also, as has been said, it's not clear if all the allocated money has actually been spent.