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    Scientists Say The Rush To Do COVID Research Led To A Whole Lot Of Waste

    That's the perspective in new papers in Lancet Global Health that assess the nearly a quarter of a million studies on treatments for COVID-19.
    by Joanne Silberner Apr 23, 2021 5 minutes
    Source: Lily Padula for NPR

    The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it an unprecedented explosion of scientific research. There are currently nearly 250,000 listings in the World Health Organization's global database of COVID-19 studies. The listings include preprints (the familiar "not yet published" studies often mentioned in news articles), published literature and reports, plus registries of clinical trials.

    But many of these articles and trials have been in vain, say an international group of researchers. While recognizing the "incredible pressure" researchers, regulators and policy makers have felt during COVID-19's quick and mysterious onslaught, they're concerned about "an overwhelmingly large number of clinical trials ... of questionable methodological quality."

    The researchers blame at least part of the wasted effort on the way many COVID-19 experiments were run. They write: "...the medical research community's response to COVID-19 has arguably been inefficient and wasteful."

    But they say there is a way to prevent

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