Quoted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She notes, for example, that in an emergency where people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
“But it doesn’t work scientifically,” Ossorio said. “It doesn’t produce good enough data that you can actually have any confidence that the test intervention is safe or effective.”
“We have this real brick and mortar view of how clinical research had to happen, and I think COVID has really challenged that,” said Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical trials development for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health.
Song Gao, an assistant professor of geographic information science at UW-Madison, was among the first to study and map how people’s mobility changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at UW-Madison, launched “Dear Pandemic,” a social media group that communicates the latest COVID-19 research.
“The world is just going to be different,” Jones said, “Getting to the point where there’s hopefully a vaccine that’s effective is going to take enough time that I think science will change.”