Mom and Dad Talk Clinical Trials in a Pandemic
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
There has been a lot of confusion during the COVID-19 crisis about what counts as legitimate clinical evidence that a treatment really works. The president is endorsing unproven drug therapies based on anecdotal accounts. And while Lawfare is not a clinical trials or medical site, the subject of treating coronavirus cases certainly has become a national security issue.
Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic just happen to know the perfect people to offer a basic explainer of the clinical research process. Mom and Dad.
To be precise, Ben's mom and Quinta's dad, both of whom are biostatisticians. Janet Wittes is the president of Statistics Collaborative, a company that designs and analyzes data from clinical trials. She used to be the chief of statistics at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Steve Buyske is a professor of statistics at Rutgers University, who works on biostatistics, statistical genetics and experimental design. The four gathered in the virtual Jungle Studio to talk about the history of clinical trials, the standards for good clinical research and to what extent those standards can slip when you're dealing with an ongoing pandemic that is killing people worldwide.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | The typical way you study malaria vaccines is to randomize people into a vaccine group and a control group, |
| 0:41.0 | and give everybody malaria. |
| 0:43.0 | You put mosquitoes in a cup, put a cup of your arm, and you let them in mosquitoes bite you. |
| 0:49.0 | And the idea is that the people who didn't get the vaccine will get malaria, |
| 0:54.0 | and the people who did get the vaccine, the hope is they won't get malaria. |
| 0:58.0 | You can't do that kind of study with COVID-19. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittis. |
| 1:05.0 | And I'm Quintetjurexic. |
| 1:07.0 | And this is the LawFair podcast. |
| 1:10.0 | April 21st 2020. |
| 1:13.0 | There's been a lot of confusion during the COVID-19 crisis about what counts as legitimate clinical evidence that a treatment really works. |
| 1:21.0 | The president is endorsing unproven drug therapies based on anecdotal accounts. |
| 1:27.0 | And while LawFair is not a clinical trials or medical site, the subject of treating coronavirus cases certainly has become a national security issue. |
| 1:37.0 | We just happen to know two of the perfect people to offer a basic explainer in the clinical research process. |
| 1:42.0 | Mom and dad. |
| 1:44.0 | To be precise, spends mom and my dad, both of whom are bio statisticians. |
... |
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