Carl Hennigan

and ramping up the evidence and production of evidence.

And so we've seen very helpful guidance come out from NICE on managing and keeping patients in the community, and particularly the helpful advice about viral and bacterial pneumonia and what to do.

And I think what we'll do is it'll be helpful to put the link to that at the end on the page for the podcast today.

Well, you know, listeners to this podcast will know I'm tortured by bias.

And one of the most red pages on our catalogue of bias is hot stuff bias.

When a topic is fashionable, hot, investigators may be less critical in their approach to their research and investigators and editors may not be able to resist the temptation to publish the results.

chloroquine is right in the hot stuff bias.

And it's really important and very interesting that we understand what's going on.

And this will be a seminal case where we'll start to understand how everybody got on the sort of bandwagon cause a little bit of evidence in vivo appeared.

And from there we had a small trial that was so flawed it should have never got published, should have been assigned to the bin.

And what Robin's alluding to is, oh boy, do we need these proper trials done well.

But the problem is, is if you go into some places like China, you can't do it now because their pandemic's over.

So you have to be prepared and do it well.

The second point I wanted to make is,

I've been in contact with a colleague of mine, Tom Jefferson, who probably has done the most systematic reviews on influenza, respiratory infections and antivirals in the world.

And he pointed to me to a review that was actually stopped in 2001, which was about looking at treatments for the common cold.

Believe it or not, there used to be a medical research council's common cold unit in the UK that ran over a thousand studies between 1946 and 89.

And then we shelved all that research because of issues like HIV and other emerging diseases.

So I think there's lots to be learned in looking backwards, trying to look at some of the treatments that have been used before and then ensuring we properly trial them.

I'm not even sure this is waste.