Helen MacDonald

And Paul's been working on a systematic review related to COVID.

And given his past experience quantifying waste and his current experience now,

I wondered if he would refresh our memories on what we know and give us his reflections on what he's seeing in research on COVID so far.

So what do you think could be done to improve things?

Zooming away from what researchers are doing and to a broader perspective,

kind of meta level.

Do you have any thoughts on the coordination of COVID research?

Because one thing that seemed striking as we've looked at some of the examples for the podcast, whether it was chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir, there's a lot of very small studies going on, sometimes open label, perhaps with very poor comparisons.

Do you think there are issues around also just the quality of the design of some of these studies and the kind of duplication of effort perhaps across these questions?

Sort of how many trials on hydroxychloroquine do we need to get a reasonable answer to that question?

The things that stood out for me from what Paul said was the

This lack of central body to coordinate research, which I guess in some ways is a strength because it gives people flexibility, but in something like a pandemic where we're wanting to ensure that we're doing things efficiently is a compromise.

And interesting to hear that the WHO are doing a good job with vaccine studies, but interesting also to contrast that to...

the less coordinated approach in other areas and potentially the neglect of some of those basic environmental and prevention strategies.

Really interesting to hear Paul cautioning against us putting too many eggs in the vaccine basket.

And I wonder for some of our listeners, if his comments around preprints could be to some extent fixed by really making sure that people are using the best reporting statements, even when they're submitting their work to preprints through the pandemic.

Because

people are having to look at preprints and act on them in a way that perhaps they wouldn't if speed wasn't of the essence.

So just even basic things like showing your research to someone else before you submit it, just to get another pair of eyes to see things that you might have missed.

Yeah, it's just that balance, isn't it, between speed and quality.