Fears that clinical trials for Covid treatments cut corners are not supported by evidence which suggests many drug studies were better designed than those in other medical fields, a new study has claimed.
With researchers racing to find reliable vaccines and treatments for coronavirus in 2020, amid ongoing lockdowns and soaring death rates, there were concerns that the acceleration of many drug trials – which had typically taken years to complete, rather than months – may have led to a fall in quality control.
According to one paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, some 4,000 studies had been placed on preprint servers throughout the year, while a further 1,221 clinical trials related to Covid had been registered by May 2020. Although efforts to ensure quality had been made, “no location is exempt from the pressures and speed at which Covid-19 research is occurring”, it remarked.
However, a new study by University of Oxford academics published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which compared Covid drug trials to pre-pandemic trials, suggests that “pandemic research design may not be worse than usual and, based on some outcomes, may be improved”.
