Helen MacDonald

That was quite interesting.

I was going to ask Carl what he thought about that.

I totally hear what you're saying around you don't,

what sort of micromanagement of your research agenda, but how could we strike a better balance between people being free to do what they think is necessary in terms of research with also trying to identify what are the priority areas that I guess would serve society best?

I guess if those small studies couldn't get off the ground because their local ethics committee would have said, well, you don't have enough people, they might have then been forced to think, well, let's call the next hospital over from us.

Let's see if we can try and collaborate and pull some of the information.

And then you start to see some of those standard things as sort of incentivizing behaviors that are likely to lead to stronger research.

Does guidance like that exist, Carl?

Goodbye from me.

Yes, I'm Helen MacDonald, UK Research Editor at the BMJ.

And Carl.

Yes, indeed.

In my chat with Robin Ferner last week about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, he mentioned having greater hope for this drug remdesivir.

So I was quite interested when I saw this research paper on remdesivir in New England Journal of Medicine a few days ago.

It described compassionate use of remdesivir for patients with severe COVID-19.

But to be quite frank, it didn't really bring me any clarity.

It was

A descriptive paper of 61 or so people in a whole variety of settings in many countries around the world that didn't have any kind of comparison group.

So it sort of left me back at square one.

So instead, I called Robin's colleague, Jeff Aronson at the University of Oxford, who together with Robin Ferner has been taking a broader look at the evidence around this drug.