As the
coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world, medical science was starting from scratch. While the long-range goal was an effective vaccine, millions could — and would — die before a shot was approved and widely distributed. The best bet for preventing as many deaths as possible was to find existing drugs that could treat Covid-19.
But doing this would require enormous capacity: Researchers had to test a lot of different therapies simultaneously, which would mean recruiting thousands of patients to participate. In the US, the New York Times’s Carl Zimmer
wrote in January 2021: “many trials for Covid antivirals were doomed from the start — too small and poorly designed to provide useful data.”
The United Kingdom’s Recovery Trial was the opposite: massive and simple. It has proven to be the most effective program in the world for delivering desperately needed research results. Pharmaceutical companies sought out partnerships with the Recovery Trial because they see it as the most reliable way to determine whether their drugs can help stop the global outbreak. Since June 2020, when Horby and Landray saw the first results on dexamethasone, the trial has since identified another drug,
tocilizumab, that improves mortality rates. It has also done the valuable service of demonstrating that some once-promising treatment candidates don’t work.
