Dr. John Wallace | Good science takes time — even during a pandemic

Good science takes time. This has always been obvious to us doing health research — not to the general public. The pursuit of a cure for COVID-19 requires managing expectations about what is possible as well as what is possible.

Finding a vaccine is a difficult task, but it’s not like finding needles in a haystack. Scientists start from a place of knowledge. Researchers around the world are already working on more than 150 possible vaccines and 22 have participated in human trials. There are also thousands of previously developed drugs in the trial. The COVID-19 vaccine is very likely to arrive earlier than before. Still, it’s still worth remembering that it can take months, perhaps years. And frankly, it should.

Why is it so long? Whatever incentives, resources and pressures are applied, it takes time to do it right. Ensuring safety is especially important for the elderly who are susceptible to COVID-19 and other health problems. But that is important to all of us.

The COVID-19 vaccine is rapidly given to billions of people with diverse genetic, health, and environmental settings. Testing these populations and subpopulations requires immeasurable planning and coordination. You can’t do everything in parallel. Some new results require new research.

As Merck CEO Ken Frazier said in a recent interview, “I don’t want to rush the vaccine before doing rigorous science. For example, in recent cases of swine flu, the vaccine was more harmful. I don’t have a great history of getting a vaccine up and running quickly during a pandemic, and I want to remember that.”

Good science takes time.

Meanwhile, people and the government have already shown that they are willing to accept shortcuts. Individuals begged, borrowed and stolen for personal protective equipment, medicines and other household items, from hand sanitizers to toilet paper. The government has raised prices, triggered emergencies, and virtually hijacked equipment to supply citizens. They have spent billions on accessing drugs that do not yet exist.

Being balanced, people are instead trafficking information. It simplifies speaking beyond your expertise and is overstated and engaging. The number of unexamined studies is increasing rapidly. Early publication makes the data and contact lines available to other researchers faster, but also makes it easier to make misinformation, premature reports, and social media guesses. In January, a “preprint” describing research into the origins of COVID-19 was disseminated on Twitter and featured in the news media before gathering another research paper to uncover scientific criticism and its findings.

Even medical journals are notorious for being peer-reviewed scientific forts and notorious publications, but have been accused of publishing research that needs to be turned back. The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, with nearly 400 years of history, found in August’s journal that both issued coronavirus withdrawals on the same day. The New York Times reported that the peer review process favored by these and other journals has been reduced from months to days.

Social scientists are also rushing to publish for their danger in a pandemic. Again, many of their COVID-19 papers are being printed in a hurry—written and reviewed on a timeline that is more suited to daily journalism than the intended persistence of the scientific literature.

“I was recently asked to review three such articles in scientific journals,” Professor Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago recently wrote in Bloomberg’s Opinion. “Editors typically took six weeks to complete one review, but were asked to complete three reviews in one week.”

And these are the pitfalls of well-designed claims. Don’t think about things without pure motives. But they do exist.

It is also important to distinguish between the science itself and the organizational obstacles that new research needs to navigate. Ironically, there are more legitimate ways to streamline science through collaboration. Artificial intelligence. Customized drug discovery. Digital tools such as cloud storage, video conferencing, Slack. An endless way to create, analyze and share big data. All of these are in our favor when it comes to defeating COVID-19.

However, in real research and testing speed cannot be prioritized. My company is currently doing drug testing. Not for COVID-19, but for pain. Of course, we want to bring therapy to the market at all reasonable speeds. But our case cannot be rushed without creating unacceptable risk.

I also feel that the COVID-19 vaccine should be different from the global pandemic, but I can’t. We all want a vaccine as soon as possible and everything must be wise to make it happen. But it has to work and it must be safe for as many people as possible. Whatever it is, good science takes time.