This feature story explained that the pandemic stress-tested the way the world produces and synthesises medical evidence – and revealed enormous flaws.
Over the last 30 years, doctors worldwide have embraced evidence-based medicine – the transformative idea that they should decide how to treat people using rigorous evidence, such as clinical trials.
But the pandemic exposed major weaknesses in the production and use of research-based evidence – failures that have inevitably cost lives. The story reported that, by May 2021, researchers had registered more than 2,900 clinical trials related to COVID-19, but the majority were too small or poorly designed to be of much use. Organizations worldwide have scrambled to synthesize the available evidence on drugs, masks and other key issues, but can’t keep up with the outpouring of new research. One database contained nearly 9,000 systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses related to COVID-19 by May 2021. But ironically, just like the primary research they are synthesizing, many of the syntheses themselves are of poor quality or repetitive.
There’s been “research waste at an unprecedented scale”, says Huseyin Naci, who studies health policy at the London School of Economics. “The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably been one of the greatest challenges to evidence-based medicine since the term was coined in the last century,” wrote one doctor.
The story explored an original and fundamentally important angle on the pandemic.