Then when it comes out as measurement error, the public is all "Damn these scientists are all hype machine clowns..."
I’m less fine with the time and resources spent on mouse models. They already know you’d get the same utility from a magic 8 ball, but they do it anyway.
Also, you can do nasty stuff to mice that would never be allowed with humans. In that experiment they injected cancer cells in mice with a bad inmune system, so they could get like 90 mice with cancer and run the experiment in a short time. No ethical committee would approve that in humans.
I think the final COVID consortium report has something like 30k authors.
It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).