Just years ago, it covered the lack of transparency and information around clinical trials, and today, it's fearmongering about something that could help solve part of the issue.
A simple principle underpins prediction markets: the more impactful the subject matter, the more important it is to have the market’s wisdom on the topic. Of course, we don’t allow everything to be traded on, but important metrics like unemployment data and recessions are meaningful signals of where the world is headed, even (and especially) if the metrics themselves are indicators that something harmful is likely to happen.
Clinical trials fall squarely within this category. Given their importance, you would think there would be some sort of clear, easy way for the general public to know information about their likelihood of succeeding. There is not.
What little information that does exist about clinical trial success probabilities is largely gatekept as proprietary research by pharma companies and Wall Street, written in language that most people cannot understand, and, critically, fragmented across dozens of sources.
That fragmentation has serious consequences. Despite all of the technological advancements we have seen in the time since, American drug development is EIGHTY-FIVE TIMES less efficient than it was in the 1950s. This phenomenon, cleverly called "Eroom's Law", is at least in part because of information siloes, as the original authors acknowledge.
To make matters worse, the Times knows this. Here is a direct quote from a cancer patient who wrote an opinion for the Times:
“While confronting cancer, a situation fraught with terror about personal survival, most men and women simply do not know our options and we do not have the ability to discover them on our own.”
The natural solution to information fragmentation is, of course, an information aggregator. That is what prediction markets are. That is what Kalshi is building with this market vertical.
Even slight efficiency improvements would mean getting more drugs in the hands of more people at faster rates. It's hard to even calculate how impactful this would be, but it would likely be on the scale of hundreds of millions of additional healthy days of human life.
Given their particular expertise in the information siloes of clinical trials, you would think the Times would be excited for potential solutions, or at the very least, refrain from open bias against them.
Sadly, the Times chose not to adhere to editorial integrity and instead cave to their well-documented bias against the technology industry. Former editors have confirmed the unique role of “narrative” at the Times, and according to Vox, multiple Times reporters have confirmed this directive to be one explicitly against the tech industry.
Media is a healthy way to scrutinize and shine a light on things. But it shouldn’t be used to bias people into a place of fear and inertia.
If you are a reader of this story, instead of being prompted to think critically through some of these problems, you are inundated with fear and paranoia from a number of clearly biased editorial decisions from the moment you hit the page:
The headline is one-sided and incites fear. It does not represent reality or even the reporting itself.
The headline also implies that these markets present a novel or unique risk, something that even the “critics” cited in the story disagree with. Critic Amanda Fischer called these markets a “backhanded way to essentially bet on the equity price”, acknowledging that her purported concerns of these markets also apply to the biotech equities market. The same risk of trial drop-outs and the same financial incentive for a trial to fail (one that is much larger on the equities market) apply to the stock market just like they do with prediction markets. The fact these markets have operated for decades without materially affecting the quality of clinical trials is proof that these “risks” are overblown. Even the critics of these markets agree, and yet the headline does not.
There is language throughout the story that is clearly designed to play up the severity of one side of the argument. Perhaps the most hilarious example is saying that a petition against these markets had “more than” 180 signatures. 180 is a laughably insignificant amount of signatures that shows the lack of interest more than anything else, intentionally framed to maximize the fear behind this product. Change.org itself shows that at least 100,000 signatures is the typical level that leads to affecting national and corporate level decisionmaking.
The cover image, of a poker table with shadowy figures, further misleads the audience along these lines and displays the intentional bias more than anything else: Why a poker table when we’re talking about long-term derivative markets on healthcare? Should we use a poker table for every article about biotech stocks?
In the words of Holly Fernandez, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, quoted by the Times:
“Anything you do that undermines trust in clinical research can have really negative downstream effects.”
The misleading fearmongering about clinical trial markets from the New York Times does just that.
