Trials and tribulations

摘要

WHAT DO a malaria drug, a Russian vac-cine and the blood plasma of people who have recovered from covid-19 have in common? All have been approved for use by governments in response to the corona-virus pandemic, with little or no scientific substance to back those decisions up.On March 28th, near the pandemic's beginning, America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued emergency-use authorisation for hydroxychloroquine, an established but not risk-free antimalarial medicine which was controversially being proposed by some people, including Donald Trump, the country's president, as a possible covid treatment. It did so, the authorisation stated, based on "limited in vitro and anecdotal clinical data". On August 11th Vladimir Putin, Mr Trump's Russian counterpart, said his government was the world's first to approve a coronavirus vaccine, despite a lack of proper tests. And on August 23rd Mr Trump announced approval of the use of convalescent plasma therapy to treat covid-19. He described it as a "very historic breakthrough" on the basis of a study the statistics of which the head of the FDA, Stephen Hahn, got publicly and spectacularly wrong.