Coronavirus Clinical Trials: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Randomized trials are the gold-standard of medical literature, but that doesn’t mean they are never wrong.

There has been an explosion of research into COVID-19, from its underlying biology, to its potential treatments. I have not only lauded the scientific community for this rapid-fire pace of research but have contributed to the growing body of literature myself. All good, right?

Well, maybe not. It’s possible there might be too much of a good thing here, as this article, appearing in JAMA Network Open shows.

Researchers from MD Anderson queried clinicaltrials.gov, the central US registry for (in theory) all clinical trials. Since 2007, if you were going to run a clinical trial that you wanted to publish eventually, you had to register it in clinicaltrials.gov before it got underway. The idea is to prevent the “burying” of negative clinical trial results. It’s not perfect, but nowadays almost all legitimate trials have an entry on this site.

OK so the researchers looked for trials involving COVID-19 and the numbers here are really…