Category Archives: Scientists

The New Culture War

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American Identity Is The New Culture War - Auburn Seminary

You’re either a liberal snowflake controlled by big government or a greedy conservative willing to sacrifice Grandma for the economy. It took less than two months for Americans to get here.

Wear a mask? You’re a liberal snowflake controlled by big government. Want to reopen restaurants? You’re a greedy conservative willing to sacrifice Grandma for the economy.

It took less than two months for the coronavirus pandemic to become just the latest battle in the culture wars.

With the country still in the firm grip of the coronavirus pandemic, conservatives are on social media and Fox News stoking protests that argue masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing violate constitutional rights and are causing unacceptable harm to the economy.

Liberals, at the same time, say personal liberties must be sacrificed for public health, even as millions file for unemployment and more than a quarter of the work force is jobless in some states.

Take a look at what two governors — one from a reliably Republican state and another from a reliably Democratic state — said this week.

“We have a public health crisis in this country, there’s no doubt about it,” Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “But we also have an economic crisis.”

“We have turned the corner and we are on the decline,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, citing an article showing that the death rate has fallen by half in New York City, in his daily briefing on Wednesday. “To me, that vindicates what we are doing here in New York, which says: Follow the science, follow the data, put the politics aside and the emotion aside. What we’re doing here shows results.”

The problem with all these politics? Epidemiology.

So far, the virus has hit Democratic states the hardest, with the most cases per capita in five deeply Democratic states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and Illinois. Cities have borne the brunt of the caseload. And African-Americans and Latinos — a key part of the Democratic coalition — are getting sick and dying of the virus at higher rates.

But anyone who believes this virus is fading away — or somehow contained to urban areas — is engaging in some serious magical thinking.

At least 25,000 new coronavirus cases are identified almost daily, meaning that the total in the United States — which has the highest number of known cases in the world — is expanding daily by 2 to 4 percent.

A New York Times analysis found that 18 of the states that are reopening had an increase of daily average cases over the last two weeks. Fifteen of those states are led by Republican governors.

Three of the top five states where the virus is spreading the fastest — Texas, Georgia and Ohio — have Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures. All three have moved toward reopening.

In the Midwest and South, smaller towns and more rural areas have suddenly been hit hard as the virus tears through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons.

The nation’s highest per capita infection rate can be found in Trousdale County, Tenn., a rural county where a prison has become a hot spot. Businesses in the county are reopening this week.

In the Trump era, rural counties like Trousdale have represented the backbone of the Republican base. In Trousdale, nearly 67 percent of the county supported President Trump in 2016. Over all, the average margin of victory in rural counties won by Republicans was nearly 47 percent in 2016.

Rural areas tend to be older and have a larger share of the population with pre-existing medical conditions, making them far more vulnerable to the worst health effects of the virus.

Republican governors and conservative activists may think the coronavirus is an urban problem. Or a density problem. Or, quite frankly, a Democratic problem.

They may soon find out that it’s not.

 

 

 

 

The White House said it was following health experts’ advice. Then we learned it isn’t approving a key CDC document.

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Economic Crisis, Economy, Ethics, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Decentralized, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Intent, Leadership Trust, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Transparency, Trust, Truth • Leave a comment

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Diseases & Conditions | CDC

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made a point at the start of Wednesday’s news briefing to emphasize that President Trump is following health experts’ advice as we enter what Trump has labeled the “next stage” of the coronavirus response — reopening the economy.

“As you are well aware, President Trump has consistently sided with the experts and always prioritized the health and safety of the American people,” McEnany said.

Several hours later, we got another example of the White House resisting what those health experts are advising.

The Associated Press reported around midnight that the White House had shelved planned guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document, which was due nearly a week ago, was aimed at providing local authorities with step-by-step guidance on how to reopen:

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

A coronavirus task force official told The Washington Post that the document has not been completely shelved but was in the process of being revised because it was “overly specific.” The official also indicated that it was felt the document was too broad, as “guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”

The denial, though, reinforces that the White House is reluctant to submit to the CDC’s more detailed prescriptions for reopening the economy. And it’s difficult to divorce the delay in this document’s publication from Trump’s anxiety to reopen the economy — and the tension that has created with past guidelines.

The administration in mid-April issued phased advice on when areas should start to reopen places such as restaurants and other nonessential businesses. But many states have moved forward with certain elements of reopening without actually satisfying those guidelines. Most notably, they have begun to reopen without meeting the Phase One guideline that they should see a decrease in confirmed coronavirus cases over a 14-day period.

As The Post’s Philip Bump reported, some states that have pushed forward with reopening have also seen an increase in cases — which would prevent them from satisfying the requirement for moving into Phase Two. That requirement is that the decline should continue for another 14 days after Phase One begins.

Issuing a detailed document would seemingly complicate further reopenings, because it would again restrict what states and local authorities are supposed to do.

The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey previewed what the document was set to look like last week. And they also obtained a draft of the document. The new guidelines were to go beyond the initial ones in prescribing specific actions that could be taken in each phase of the reopening. Advocates for reopening have worried that strict guidance could make it difficult for businesses, churches, child-care centers and other facilities to actually function.

Trump, who has long signaled a desire to begin reopening that economy sooner rather than later, has doubled down on that rhetoric in recent days. Despite a steady national death rate that approached previous highs on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even though cases continue to increase outside the major U.S. hotbed of New York City, Trump on Tuesday signaled that we are entering the “next stage” of reopening the economy.

“Thanks to the profound commitment of our citizens, we’ve flattened the curve, and countless American lives have been saved,” Trump said. “Our country is now in the next stage of the battle: a very safe phased and gradual reopening. So, reopening of our country — who would have ever thought we were going to be saying that? A reopening. Reopening.”

Trump has been resistant to the advice of the health officials around him, from the early days of the outbreak when he continuously downplayed the severity of the situation. On several occasions, this tension has boiled over.

We’re also hearing from those officials less and less. The CDC long ago ceased holding briefings on the coronavirus outbreak, and the White House coronavirus task force briefings, which often featured health experts Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx, have now been halted in favor of less-frequent and less-coronavirus-focused briefings from McEnany. Fauci has also been prevented from testifying to the Democratic-controlled House, although he is still slated to testify in the GOP-controlled Senate and has continued doing some interviews. The cumulative effect is that these health experts aren’t on the record as much as the effort to reopen the economy begins in earnest.

In the place of those public comments, the CDC guidelines were to provide firm and detailed advice from those officials for the new stage. But for reasons that seem pretty conspicuous, we still don’t have them.

 

 

 

Whistleblower alleges Trump administration ignored coronavirus warnings

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Clinical Research, Clinical Research Funding, Clinical Testing, Clinical Trials, Conflicts of Interest, Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Policy, Hydroxychloroquine, Misinformation, Mislead, Misleading, Mistake, Mistrust, Scientists, Transparency, Trust, Truth, U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) • Leave a comment

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Whistleblower alleges Trump administration ignored coronavirus ...

Rick Bright, the former director of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed a whistleblower complaint Tuesday alleging that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to take early action to mitigate the threat of the novel coronavirus.

Flashback: Bright said last month he believes he was ousted after clashing with HHS leadership over his attempts to limit the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus.

What’s new: In his complaint, Bright claims he was excluded from an HHS meeting on the coronavirus in late January after he “pressed for urgent access to funding, personnel, and clinical specimens, including viruses” to develop treatments for the coronavirus should it spread outside of Asia.

  • Bright alleges it “became increasingly clear” in late January that “HHS leadership was doing nothing to prepare for the imminent mask shortage.”
  • Bright claims he “resisted efforts to fall into line with the Administration’s directive to promote the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and to award lucrative contracts for these and other drugs even though they lacked scientific merit and had not received prior scientific vetting.”
  • He adds that “even as HHS leadership began to acknowledge the imminent shortages in critical medical supplies, they failed to recognize the magnitude of the problem, and they failed to take the necessary urgent action.”

The White House declined to comment. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6882494-NEW-R-Bright-OSC-Complaint-Redacted.html

 

 

 

 

There’s a more accurate way to compare coronavirus deaths to the flu

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Flu vs Covid19 death rate by age per CDC : Coronavirus

If we measure flu mortality the same way we count covid-19 deaths, the picture becomes very stark.

Months into the coronavirus pandemic, some politicians and pundits continue to promote ham-handed comparisons between covid-19 and the seasonal flu to score political points.

Though there are many ways to debunk this fundamentally flawed comparison, one of the clearest was put forth this week by Jeremy Samuel Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

As Faust describes it, the issue boils down to this: The annual flu mortality figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are estimates produced by plugging laboratory-confirmed deaths into a mathematical model that attempts to correct for undercounting. Covid-19 death figures represent a literal count of people who have either tested positive for the virus or whose diagnosis was based on meeting certain clinical and epidemiological criteria.

Such a comparison is of the apples to oranges variety, Faust writes, as the former are “inflated statistical estimates” and the latter are “actual numbers.”

To get a more accurate comparison, one must start with the number of directly confirmed flu deaths, which the CDC tracks on an annual basis. In the past seven flu seasons, going back to 2013, that tally fluctuated between 3,448 and 15,620 deaths.

Note that these numbers are very different from the CDC’s final official flu death estimates. For 2018-2019, for instance, the 7,172 confirmed flu deaths translated to a final estimate of between 26,339 and 52,664 deaths. Again, that’s because the CDC plugs the confirmed deaths into a model that attempts to adjust for what many epidemiologists believe is a severe undercount.

Now, let’s add a bar for this season’s covid-19 deaths, which as of this writing stands at 63,259, and which will be even higher by the time you read this. Note the drastic change in the y-axis to accommodate the scale of covid-19 mortality.

This year’s data are necessarily incomplete, as 22 weeks remain in the flu season. There are not likely to be many more flu deaths, as we are well past the worst of the season. But covid-19 mortality has plateaued at around 2,000 deaths per day. Where it will head next is anyone’s guess.

Using an apples-to-apples comparison, we can say that the coronavirus has already killed eight times as many people as the flu. By the time we get data for the entire season, the difference appears likely to be at least tenfold, or a full order of magnitude.

The coronavirus, Faust writes, “is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.”

One of the most challenging things about this pandemic is making sense of the profound uncertainty surrounding the many quantities that might appear, at first glance, to be rock solid. On the surface, comparing flu and coronavirus deaths seems like a simple proposition: dig up the official numbers of both and see which is greater.

But that effort gets complicated as soon as you realize that flu mortality is not reported as a tally but as an estimated range, which is far different from the individual counts, based on testing and diagnoses, used for covid-19. And because we can’t test and diagnose everyone, those covid-19 deaths are probably undercounted as well. Soon, what once appeared to be a simple mathematical exercise turns into a mess of algorithms, estimates and uncertainty.

People encountering that uncertainty for the first time, as many of us are during this pandemic, are likely to react in one of two ways. Some cherry-pick a single number that comports with their biases, creating an artificial certainty to score political points or avoid upsetting their preconceptions. That’s what the politicians and talking heads using faulty flu data to downplay the outbreak are doing. Others throw their hands up and declare the truth to be unknowable, indulging in the cynicism that believes you can “make statistics say whatever you want.”

But rather than try to make sense of this uncertainty ourselves, there’s a third option: turning to the experts who’ve devoted their entire careers to these questions. We can listen to the epidemiologists and physicians, people like Faust and his colleagues, who are trained to draw the best possible conclusions out of uncertain data, understanding that those conclusions may have to be updated as new information comes in.

And while the experts might not all agree on some points, something like a critical consensus emerges if we listen to enough of them. Then, that consensus can be used to inform policy that helps save lives and protect the economy.

 

 

 

The pandemic didn’t come out of nowhere. The U.S. ignored the warnings.

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Economic Crisis, Emergency Preparedness, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mislead, Misleading, Mortality, National Security, National Security Risk, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Scientists • Leave a comment

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The pandemic didn't come out of nowhere. The U.S. ignored the ...

“CAME OUT of nowhere,” President Trump said March 6 of the coronavirus pandemic. “I just think this is something . . . that you can never really think is going to happen.” A few weeks later, he added, “I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world.” Mr. Trump also said, “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.”

Of course, no one can pinpoint the exact moment that lightning will strike. But a global pandemic? Experts have predicted it, warned about the preparedness gaps and urged action. Again and again and again.

Just look at 2019. In January, the U.S. intelligence community issued its annual global threat assessment. It declared, “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support. . . . The growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission. The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations.”

In September, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a report titled “Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic.” The report found that if such a pathogen emerged, “it would likely have significant public health, economic, social, and political consequences. . . . The combined possibilities of short incubation periods and asymptomatic spread can result in very small windows for interrupting transmission, making such an outbreak difficult to contain.” The report pointed to “large national and international readiness gaps.”

In October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, working with the Johns Hopkins center and the Economist Intelligence Unit, published its latest Global Health Security Index, examining open-source information about the state of health security across 195 nations, and scoring them. The report warned, “No country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics, and every country has important gaps to address.” The report found that “Fewer than 5 percent of countries scored in the highest tier for their ability to rapidly respond to and mitigate the spread of an epidemic.”

In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a study by its Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security. It warned, “The American people are far from safe. To the contrary, the United States remains woefully ill-prepared to respond to global health security threats. This kind of vulnerability should not be acceptable to anyone. At the extreme, it is a matter of life and death. . . . Outbreaks proliferate that can spread swiftly across the globe and become pandemics, disrupting supply chains, trade, transport, and ultimately entire societies and economies.” The report recommended: “Restore health security leadership at the White House National Security Council.”

Came out of nowhere? Not even close. The question that must be addressed in future postmortems is why all this expertise and warning was ignored.

 

 

 

 

‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership

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Sadness' and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership ...

The coronavirus pandemic is shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism. This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.

As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.

“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.

“I feel a desperate sadness,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University and a lifelong and ardent Atlanticist.

The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.

Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.

As the calamity unfolds, President Trump and state governors are not only arguing over what to do, but also over who has the authority to do it. Mr. Trump has fomented protests against the safety measures urged by scientific advisers, misrepresented facts about the virus and the government response nearly daily, and this week used the virus to cut off the issuing of green cards to people seeking to emigrate to the United States.

“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

The pandemic has exposed the strengths and weaknesses of just about every society, Mr. Moïsi noted. It has demonstrated the strength of, and suppression of information by, an authoritarian Chinese state as it imposed a lockdown in the city of Wuhan. It has shown the value of Germany’s deep well of public trust and collective spirit, even as it has underscored the country’s reluctance to step up forcefully and lead Europe.

And in the United States, it has exposed two great weaknesses that, in the eyes of many Europeans, have compounded one another: the erratic leadership of Mr. Trump, who has devalued expertise and often refused to follow the advice of his scientific advisers, and the absence of a robust public health care system and social safety net.

“America prepared for the wrong kind of war,” Mr. Moïsi said. “It prepared for a new 9/11, but instead a virus came.”

“It raises the question: Has America become the wrong kind of power with the wrong kind of priorities?” he asked.

Ever since Mr. Trump moved into the White House and turned America First into his administration’s guiding mantra, Europeans have had to get used to the president’s casual willingness to risk decades-old alliances and rip up international agreements. Early on, he called NATO “obsolete” and withdrew U.S. support from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.

But this is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.

In Berlin, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has said as much.

China took “very authoritarian measures, while in the U.S., the virus was played down for a long time,” Mr. Maas recently told Der Spiegel magazine.

“These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe,” Mr. Maas said.

America once told a story of hope, and not just to Americans. West Germans like Mr. Maas, who grew up on the front line of the Cold War, knew that story by heart, and like many others in the world, believed it.

But nearly three decades later, America’s story is in trouble.

The country that helped defeat fascism in Europe 75 years ago next month, and defended democracy on the continent in the decades that followed, is doing a worse job of protecting its own citizens than many autocracies and democracies.

There is a special irony: Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis.

But critics now see America failing not only to lead the world’s response, but letting down its own people as well.

“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”

Of course, some countries in Europe have also been overwhelmed by the virus, with the number of dead from Covid-19 much higher as a percentage of the population in Italy, Spain and France than in the United States. But they were struck sooner and had less time to prepare and react.

The contrast between how the United States and Germany responded to the virus is particularly striking.

While Chancellor Angela Merkel has been criticized for not taking a forceful enough leadership role in Europe, Germany is being praised for a near-textbook response to the pandemic, at least by Western standards. That is thanks to a robust public health care system, but also a strategy of mass testing and trusted and effective political leadership.

Ms. Merkel has done what Mr. Trump has not. She has been clear and honest about the risks with voters and swift in her response. She has rallied all 16 state governors behind her. A trained physicist, she has followed scientific advice and learned from best practice elsewhere.

Not long ago, Ms. Merkel was considered a spent force, having announced that this would be her last term. Now her approval ratings are at 80 percent.

“She has the mind of a scientist and the heart of a pastor’s daughter,” Mr. Garton Ash said.

Mr. Trump, in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, has appointed a panel of business executives to chart a course out of the lockdown.

Ms. Merkel, like everyone, would like to find a way out, too, but this week she warned Germans to remain cautious. She is listening to the advice of a multidisciplinary panel of 26 academics from Germany’s national academy of science. The panel includes not just medical experts and economists but also behavioral psychologists, education experts, sociologists, philosophers and constitutional experts.

“You need a holistic approach to this crisis,” said Gerald Haug, the academy’s president, who chairs the German panel. “Our politicians get that.”

A climatologist, Mr. Haug used to do research at Columbia University in New York.

The United States has some of the world’s best and brightest minds in science, he said. “The difference is, they’re not being listened to.”

“It’s a tragedy,” he added.

Some cautioned that the final history of how countries fare after the pandemic is still a long way from being written.

A pandemic is a very specific kind of stress test for political systems, said Mr. Garton Ash, the history professor. The military balance of power has not shifted at all. The United States remains the world’s largest economy. And it was entirely unclear what global region would be best equipped to kick-start growth after a deep recession.

“All of our economies are going to face a terrible test,” he said. “No one knows who will come out stronger at the end.”

Benjamin Haddad, a French researcher at the Atlantic Council, wrote that while the pandemic was testing U.S. leadership, it is “too soon to tell” if it would do long-term damage.

“It is possible that the United States will resort to unexpected resources, and at the same time find a form of national unity in its foreign policy regarding the strategic rivalry with China, which it has been lacking until now,” Mr. Haddad wrote.

There is another wild card in the short term, Mr. Moïsi pointed out. The United States has an election in November. That, and the aftermath of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, might also affect the course of history.

The Great Depression gave rise to America’s New Deal. Maybe the coronavirus will lead the United States to embrace a stronger public safety net and develop a national consensus for more accessible health care, Mr. Moïsi suggested.

“Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said.

The current crisis, some fear, could act like an accelerator of history, speeding up a decline in influence of both the United States and Europe.

“Sometime in 2021 we come out of this crisis and we will be in 2030,” said Mr. Moïsi. “There will be more Asia in the world and less West.”

Mr. Garton Ash said that the United States should take an urgent warning from a long line of empires that rose and fell.

“To a historian it’s nothing new, that’s what happens,” said Mr. Garton Ash. “It’s a very familiar story in world history that after a certain amount of time a power declines.”

“You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time,” he said. “Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”

 

 

 

 

Cartoon – Coronavirus Prevention Today

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College Signals Concern over Coronavirus Outbreak Cooks Adresses ...

Murky data fragments about a coronavirus drug

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Fact Check: Politicians on both sides make misleading claims about ...

Depending on the study, remdesivir is either a clinical failure or a godsend for treating the novel coronavirus, Axios’ Bob Herman reports.

The big picture: The grim reality of the coronavirus pandemic has the world itching to know which experimental treatments actually work, but we’re not necessarily getting any smarter from these incremental drips of incomplete information.

Driving the news: Remdesivir — an antiviral drug that some experts have seen as a promising coronavirus treatment — “was not associated with clinical or virological benefits” for coronavirus patients, according to a summary of a clinical trial in China, viewed by STAT and the Financial Times.

Between the lines: The truth is we still don’t really know how effective the drug is in fighting this virus.

  • The Chinese trial has a randomized control group, so it is by far the most reliable study. However, the trial has not gone through peer review, and Gilead said the results were “inconclusive” because the trial had to be terminated early.

The bottom line: Science is slow for a reason, and the deluge of poorly designed trials and early drafts of studies is sowing confusion instead of creating clarity.

What’s next: A more rigorous report from Gilead’s Chinese trial is expected at the end of this month, and data from other trials is expected in late May.

 

 

 

 

The High Stakes of Low Scientific Standards

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The Lucky Seven States Already Pursuing Gambling Legislation In 2018

In the midst of this pandemic, science is suffering from low standards for some research, a new study argues.

The big picture: Science — which is slow, methodical and redundant — isn’t necessarily made for the immediacy and acute public interest brought on by a health crisis.

  • Scientists rely on peer review and back and forth exchange that leads to a more polished final study. But a health crisis like the current pandemic, or the Ebola outbreak, creates a sense of urgency that can be antithetical to the scientific process.

What’s happening: A new study out today in the journal Science warns many of the clinical trials and studies first published about treatments and other issues involving the current pandemic were designed poorly or had other issues that affected their outcomes.

  • Studies that have yet to go through peer-review — like a recent, flawed study of the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus — have found their way into news stories thanks to pre-print services, leading to problematic reporting and real-time peer review through Twitter.
  • More than 18 clinical trials testing hydroxychloroquine to treat the novel coronavirus have enrolled more than 75,000 patients in North America.
  • “This massive commitment concentrates resources on nearly identical clinical hypotheses, creates competition for recruitment, and neglects opportunities to test other clinical hypotheses,” the study says.
  • Early, flawed work has potentially increased the risk that later results may have gotten false positives and more media attention than they deserved, the new study says.

Yes, but: While the pandemic is exacerbating these problems with misinformation and lax research standards, it isn’t the cause of them.

  • “Some of the problems that we’re seeing right now are actually not that exceptional compared to the problems that we have under normal conditions as well, just that maybe they’re a little bit more amplified and have a little more visibility,” Jonathan Kimmelman, director of the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and one of the authors of the new paper, told Axios.
  • These kinds of issues cropped up during previous health crises, and while the authors of the new study argue that some of those problems around information sharing and standards of research have improved, there’s still a long way to go.

What’s next: Many of these issues around varying standards of research and communication could be remedied through better communication among researchers and the agencies funding their work.

  • Instead of having a number of fragmented studies competing for resources and looking for effective treatments, the researchers say it would make more sense to bring them under one umbrella, allowing them to coordinate.
  • “You could reduce variation, and you might get answers more quickly,” Alex John London, the director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon and one of the authors of the new study, told Axios.
  • The authors are also calling on clinicians to resist performing their own small studies, instead opting to join up with larger trials.
  • They also say agencies need to help build those larger studies and avoid making statements to the public about unvalidated treatments that may or may not work, instead opting to elevate larger studies in their various stages to the public.