I feel motivated as a former due diligence/investigative research guy to expand briefly on where my frustration came from. I think it’s hard to understate how stunning a failure of due diligence this was in the first round.
Due diligence for corporate work involves much more than Googling, but, like, the first step is often just Googling. When you Google Nya Dagbladet, the Swedish Wikipedia page pops up. (The English one did not exist last year.)
Skimming the page as it existed circa fall 2022 thru Google Translate should have immediately raised several red flags, even for people not familiar with Swedish politics. These flags obviously would be taken with a grain of salt, because it’s Wikipedia, but it stuns me that they were ignored at first. These immediately apparent flags include:
The links to the far-right party Nationaldemokraterna/National Democrats
The use of at least once columnist noted for antisemitic conspiracy theories (this guy)
The “ethnopluralist” label
Irresponsible and misleading reporting related to vaccines(This was added after the letter of intent was signed, so assuming it was not clear)
Some of those flags don’t immediately check out — e.g., the ethnopluralist label is cited to the paper’s about page, but is not specifically there (nor was it there in archived version of the website). But unless we assume the Wikipedia page is a straight up hit job — which is unlikely, and would be ruled out by checking even a few of the references — then proper due diligence research would have started with a very, very heavy level of scrutiny.
But it sounds like what happened is they merely checked the Nya Dagbladet website and proposal and didn’t see anything suspicious (again, a due diligence failure, but the website is not quite as blatant at first glance as say, Breitbart News), and wrote off the evidence of far-right ties and views because “quality of public discourse worldwide has degraded so badly” such that you can’t be sure.
The baseline Wikipedia + sources check took about twenty minutes to do, including typing this up here. Strong due diligence work is really important. I get that they ultimately did not give the grant, but to me, it’s very disturbing that it even made it past the first half-hour sniff test.
Shoutout to the 130-ish people in the UK who volunteered to be infected with malaria in two separate studies at various stages of the R21 development process! Those studies helped identify Matrix-M as the ideal adjuvant, and also provided insight into the optimal dose/vaccination schedule.