This is absolutely the right call, but it makes me so livid. We could know today whether plasma saves lives, does nothing, or makes things worse. But we elected to have an expanded access program instead of a big clinical trial, so now we don’t know. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/blood-plasma-covid-19.html?referringSource=articleShare

What a fiasco. Failure to run clinical trials can be deadly — if the UK hadn’t funded a big national steroid trial and demonstrated that steroids saved lives in severe COVID, we wouldn’t know that either - some would get it and some wouldn’t, & lives would be unnecessarily lost

(Meaning some patients who would benefit). This should reinforce our skepticism about these expanded access types of programs. And it reveals the need for federal funding and infrastructure to conduct large, rapid (when needed), lean, national clinical trials.

To some extent this is about yet another screw up by the Trump administration, to some extent about regulatory failure, and to some extent the problem is our lack of a unified health system : https://twitter.com/ddrekonja/status/1296081165745618945?s=21 https://twitter.com/ddrekonja/status/1296081165745618945