Ethicists warn coronavirus researchers not to cave in to bad science
- They say that in the race to find treatments and a vaccine, some have sacrificed rigorous methods and quality control
- Ethics professors also criticise public figures for promoting unproven drugs
They said in a commentary in Science magazine on Friday that some research done on Covid-19 had sacrificed rigorous scientific methods and quality control for the sake of speed, when those standards were critical to finding the most safe and effective treatments and vaccine.
“The temptation is to think, in this crisis atmosphere, we need to move research along as quickly as possible. Doing so may require that we relax some of the normal standards we have on the quality control,” co-author Jonathan Kimmelman, a biomedical ethics professor at McGill University in Montreal, told the South China Morning Post.
“But there’s just as much at stake if not more at stake in putting out low-quality findings during a pandemic as there would be outside a pandemic.”
Kimmelman and co-author Alex London, a professor of ethics and philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said badly designed trials were unlikely to yield conclusive results, and could put patients at risk. They said the deluge of trials for treatments and vaccine candidates would be duplicating efforts.