When To Stop Hoping For a COVID-19 Miracle Cure - FiveThirtyEight, August 4, 2021
Professor Jonathan Kimmelman, Director of the Biomedical Ethics Unit is among the experts quoted by FiveThirtyEight.
"…But there’s a difference between identifying a drug that might have an effect on a target that might matter to destroying a virus, and finding a drug that definitely kills a virus. The reality is that most potential drugs turn out to not be effective at treating the thing everyone was hopeful they would, even if the drugs looked effective in early clinical trials, which are often small studies that aren’t randomized and don’t have a placebo comparison. In fact, said Jonathan Kimmelman, director of the biomedical ethics unit at Canada’s McGill University, that’s why there is this vast array of existing drugs to test as treatments, to begin with. “A lot of drugs that get to Phase II [trials] never demonstrate safety and efficacy and get abandoned. They end up in the graveyard of drugs.”