For NPR’s Goats and Soda, Joanne Silberner (@jsilberner) interviews scientists who argue that COVID-19 inspired a crush of scientifically wasteful clinical trials as the world sprang into action to find solutions to the pandemic. There’s a better, though more complicated, type of clinical study for these situations, they say: an adaptive clinical trial, which allows the parameters of the trial to change as it’s being conducted to make it more likely that its results will be scientifically useful. Image: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
