Scientific American
COVID Showed How Trials for New Drugs Could Be Faster and Better
The pandemic has spotlighted ways to make clinical trials easier on patients and better for science, a heart drug researcher says
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A dozen years and a billion or more dollars that is what it typically takes to bring a new drug from the lab to your medicine cabinet. Testing medications on patients has become a slow, arduous process. People, even those who are desperate to participate, often have to travel long distances to a study site and make the trip over and over again. For scientists, coordinating the paperwork among a large number of research centers can be extremely laborious and time-consuming.
Scientific American
Pandemic highlights for the week
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In a 2/19/21 newsletter for The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that some cautionary public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines, such as messages about risks, uncertainties, caveats and side effects all of which he calls “vaccine alarmism” are “fundamentally misleading.” Some researchers and journalists are “instinctively skeptical and cautious,” he writes, which has led to public health messages that “emphasize uncertainty and potential future bad news.” For example, the risk of a vaccinated person becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 and passing it on to someone else who then got severe COVID-19 is very small, evidence suggests, Leonhardt writes. “You wouldn’t know that from much of the public discussion,” he writes. Ambiguity like that and all the news about variants has fueled vaccine hesitancy, according to Dr. Rebecca Wur