Premature publicity

One of the features of the COVID pandemic is the near-elimination of delays in making scientific data available.  Everyone is moving to releasing preprints, and they’re that more rapidly than they did in the past.  In many ways this is great, but it does mean things can get publicised faster than they can get evaluated.

Two examples: one from a preprint, one from a press release

The preprint: There’s a headline in the Herald: Landmark study: Virus didn’t come from animals in Wuhan market. That’s a pretty big claim. So where did the Herald get  it? The Daily Mail on Sunday.  The Mail got it from a preprint that was uploaded a couple of weeks ago.   Most readers of the Mail and the Herald (including me) won’t be in a position to evaluate the credibility of the work. Because it sounds like it feeds into the whole quagmire of conspiracy theories and hoaxes around COVID origin, you’d really want to see some independent expert comment on the story. Writing a story like this  with quotes from the authors but no independent comments seems a bit irresponsible.

The press release: The Herald headline is Covid 19 coronavirus ‘cure’? US biotech company claims it’s found antibody to block virus. The CEO of the company is quoted as saying

“We want to emphasise there is a cure,’ Sorrento’s CEO, Dr Henry Ji, told Fox News.

“There is a solution that works 100 per cent. If we have the neutralising antibody in your body, you don’t need the social distancing. You can open up a society without fear

This is not normal.  “Works 100 per cent” is not something biotech CEOs go around saying about a product when they’re still trying to get FDA approval — and they haven’t actually tested the product in any humans.  Presumably the idea now is that it’s worth the risk of annoying the FDA if you get enough public interest. And since human tests have a nasty habit of not working nearly as well as lab tests, being able to sell your product without them is attractive.

The basic idea is sensible: using well-chosen synthetic antibodies rather than getting your body to make its own. In particular, they start working right away, where vaccines only start the process of getting your immune system to make antibodies. Also, some antibodies can have harmful effects, and you can avoid using those.  They’ll need to be administered by injection, and repeated as your body gets rid of them — synthetic (‘monoclonal’) antibodies for other conditions seem to mostly be given every 2-4 weeks. But, again, publishing a claim of a cure when it has not yet been shown to have any benefit at all in real live people, without any independent commentary is not best practice.