The Recovery trial’s multi-armed adaptive design and its fast-twitch release of results into the world have opened up an unusual pathway of absorption into the body of accepted scientific knowledge. (Mariusz Burcz/Alamy)
How dexamethasone came to light
Last week, a cheap and widely available steroid called dexamethasone became the first drug shown to reduce deaths among people seriously ill with COVID-19. Unusually, the results were first announced in a press release, not a peer-reviewed paper (although the results are now available in a medRxiv preprint). In a feature exploring the break-neck speed of the trial that uncovered the evidence, physician-scientist Martin Landray says the team sweated over how to best make their findings public. “Do I hold onto this information, which by this point is pretty clear-cut, or do I inform the world?” he said they asked themselves. “The answer is: you’re cursed if you do and cursed if you don’t. But by far, to me, the better option was to make the results publicly available.”Wired | 10 min read
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