The battle against Covid-19 has been marked by false hope, as too many people embraced would-be cures like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin only to have rigorous studies fail to show the drugs had a benefit.
One lesson is to only trust the most rigorous studies, known as randomized controlled clinical trials. But an equally important one: We need to get much better at conducting these rigorous studies more quickly and cheaply — and that goes beyond the Covid pandemic. This is not just a problem of science, but of infrastructure.