COVID-19: better trustworthiness of clinical evidence through clinical trials and systematic reviews

Abstract

Recently, two major medical journals, The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, each withdrew an article on coronavirus from their databases 1 and the World Health Organization (WHO) cancelled and restarted a clinical trial on the use of hydroxychloroquine for treating the COVID-19 disease. Soon afterwards, the WHO stated that the possibility of transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by asymptomatic individuals would only be rare, but then quickly denied what had been declared. Announcements of cures for COVID-19 are appearing frequently. However, there is a clear simultaneous association between such news and the share values of drug-manufacturing laboratories that are promising miraculous cures on the basis of just a few cases that were poorly or barely documented.

Making Science Computable Using Evidence-Based Medicine on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: Standards Development Project

“…Evidence implementers, including CPG and clinical decision support (CDS) creators, whether they are creating or implementing local or third-party tools, must similarly review and verify the evidence prior to use. The challenges with finding and delivering evidence are amplified by needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, [23][24][25][26][27][28] where "scientists [have] published well over 100,000 articles about the coronavirus pandemic in 2020" [29] and for which there are currently over 600,000 publications. [30] Today, these mostly manual, redundant, and disjointed processes seem to be the acknowledged status quo, even though new evidence continues to be generated at a rapid pace.…”