The US is thought to have the most talented scientists along with the best biomedical research infrastructure in the world. However, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the dismal scenario painted by the more than six million coronavirus cases and 183,000 deaths. Surprisingly, the US has produced little in the way of clinical research that has a meaningful impact on preventing infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Even the remdesivir study, one of the one of the most important in the US to date, did not show a statistically significant reduction in mortality due to an insufficient sample size.
In contrast, Britain has made substantial progress on therapeutics research where the goal is to rapidly conduct large, simple, randomized trials to define standard treatment. In mid-March the NHS began a randomized evaluation of Covid-19 therapies, known as Recovery, involving every hospital in the nation.
The US has an abundance of talented researchers. But unlike Britain, it lacks a clear, unified message from government and other major healthcare stakeholders to put in place large, simple randomized trials that are considered the standard of care for Covid-19 treatment. Read the full story here.
(Source: Ezekiel J. Emanuel, New York Times, September 1, 2020)
