OK, digging a bit deeper.
Here is the test results, straight from the horses mouth -
www.beam.vt.edu/helmet/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html
And this snip from the top of the page....
So working through what we are told here, 1st who is Virginia Tech?
https://vt.edu/about.html - On the face of it a educational research establishment. There is some info about the annual budgets but not a lot about funding, unless you count the page where they ask for donations. How are they funded? Possibly by a lot of large donations from the manufacturers of the very items they are 'independently' testing?
This, initially innocent line, does start alarm bells ringing...
What does this mean? Does this mean the university does funded research for large corporations, or is this the business arm of the Virginia Tech organisation? Maybe Virginia Tech are two of the triad, both university and commercial sports equipment tester?
Then we get to IIHS -
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/about-us
These guys do seem to be separated from the manufacturers and funded by insurance companies, i.e the people who pick up a lot of the bill for injuries that occur on the road.
So far so good, some concerns but nothing that screams 'vested interest'. However, I see this enormously significant statement right up there near the top of the page.
I didn't think there was any evidence available to back a claim of this significance. In fact, I am sure I have heard of helmet manufacturers having to withdraw adverts making such statements as it is an unsubstantiated claim?
I am a simple person but I know that for every highly publicised 'A helmet saved my life' story there must be at least as many 'they wore a helmet but died anyway' tragedies that do not get publicly discussed?
All I want to know is, in a million bicycle accidents, how many were wearing helmets and is there any difference in the proportion of fatalities in either group? I know it is not that simple for a number of reasons that skew the results and have been discussed at length in other parts of the forum, but surely some clever statistician somewhere can produce validated, meaningful figures that state 'Given current data, wearing a helmet will/will not reduce your chance of suffering a life changing head injury when cycling'.
Once we can clear that point up then I can begin to consider the value of helmet testing to identify the better products.....