Article : Covid: The London bus trip that saved maybe a million lives

Arnie Pye

Arnie Pye

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Interesting article on how doctors made the decisions they did on how to treat Covid.

Link : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56508369

I liked the last paragraph in particular :

Recovery has delivered something no other trial has quite managed. It is already guaranteed a place in the history books for its role in Covid alone. The hope is it will be the catalyst for change throughout medicine with Recovery-style trials delivering answers on the best treatments for other infections, like Lassa fever, or finally showing whether Vitamin D pills are the cure-all they are often claimed to be.

Prof Landray told me: "I think it has set a new standard for what can be delivered and not just for pandemics.

"It would be a travesty if we went back to a situation where it takes years sometimes to get a trial off the ground."
Click to expand...

I have never understood why trials took so long. Based on this article it seems there was no particular reason for it other than "This is the way we've always done it."
 
Arnie Pye said:
I have never understood why trials took so long. Based on this article it seems there was no particular reason for it other than "This is the way we've always done it."
Click to expand...
Well, I think that there will be many reasons why certain trials take, seemingly, a long time to be done, while there will be many reasons why certain trials can be done in, seemingly, a short time. It will often depend on what checks and balances are deemed appropriate for the particular trial at the particular time, as well as how much funding a trial has. A trial of treatments for a global pandemic will get special treatment for understandable reasons, which makes for an unfair comparison - the article doesn't mention how many other trials were, most likely, delayed due to the fast tracking of this one.
 
This looks like fawning hype to me. If these guys on the bus realised on March 9th that there was going to be a huge epidemic then why did they not make sure the government did something sensible about it and stop it. It could have been stopped completely on March 9th - as the Australasian countries showed. There there would have been no need to do a clever trial on tens of thousands of dying people.
 
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