A toxic legacy of poor-quality research, media hype, lax regulatory oversight, and vicious partisanship has come home to roost in the search for effective treatments for COVID-19.

The rush to offer unproven treatments outside of well-designed clinical studies undermines high-quality science and condemns us to repeat age-old errors.

It is inevitable that some people will die while properly controlled clinical trials are run, but in the end, far fewer may succumb than if early attempts at treatment are based on studies that fail to meet even the most rudimentary standards of scientific rigor.

The first rule of a good clinical trial is to establish an appropriate control group.

It was the only thing that persuaded doctors to abandon bloodletting.

If we don’t follow that rule now, SARS-CoV-2 or another novel virus will roll around again, and we will still have no effective medicines to treat it.

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