Will Brexit affect funding for ME research?

[Saz94]

I've heard some things about Brexit affecting academic research funding...

 

[Hoopoe]

I read that Brexit will prevent scientists from accessing the €100 billion Horizon Europe research fund.

Currently there is almost no EU funding for ME/CFS but that could change.

 

[Andy]

While I wouldn't like to predict when it would happen but I'm sure that the EU must, at some point, wake up to the idea of funding ME research. Once that point is reached, if the UK has left the EU at that time, then it will most probably be more difficult for UK researchers to access that funding. That's why I think it's important that the UK is a part of any pan-European efforts such as EUROMENE.

 

[rvallee]

I've heard some things about Brexit affecting academic research funding...

I would not underestimate the impact it may have on IAPT and the MUS ideology in general. Funding bloated whale corpses isn't the best of ideas when government treasury is bleeding cash. The churn of cheap low-quality psychosocial "research" may continue, it's cheap enough, but IAPT is likely to have a more limited scope, preferring instead the route of privatizing/selling as much as possible over a Rube Goldberg approach at denying medical care and defunding services by attrition.

ME research will have to be self-funded no matter what for the foreseeable future, though. I don't think it will have much of an impact on us, the only upside of being denied funding is you can't deny much further. As long as Wessely and his acolytes have any influence, and right now they have the maximum influence they will ever have, I don't expect things in the UK to overcome their ability to sabotage on the research front.

The best course would be for the few genuine ME researchers in the UK to strongly depend on international collaboration efforts. It will mitigate funding shortages by spreading out costs and sharing progress as it happens.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I've heard some things about Brexit affecting academic research funding...

Not really. The UK probably puts more money in than it gets out at present. The gripe is that cheap PhD student labour will be harder to find. I find these complaints from empire building academic politicos pretty pathetic. European funding options tend to be extremely bureaucratic and fairly limited in use in my experience.

 

[Kitty]

European funding options tend to be extremely bureaucratic and fairly limited in use in my experience.

If it's anything like EU arts funding, people will actively avoid applying! It's a shame, there have been some brilliant arts projects with genuinely radical thinking, but if you're not part of a large organisation, the bureaucracy just isn't manageable. I once got £5k for a project – a tiny component of a much bigger one, run by another company – and I had to submit the paperwork for it. It took a couple of days of full-time work, and included making four copies of every receipt and bus ticket, and analysing them in different ways on two separate forms. Never again.