國家地理:為了結束這場流行病 我們必須相信科學(8)

Second, the science itself might suffer. If researchers take shortcuts for the sake of expediency or jump too far ahead of their data to offer advice, they might unwittingly tarnish the very process they depend on. Indeed, not long after I spoke to Morse, I read a report from a team of epidemiologists and biostatisticians from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that suggested a lot of the early research was too perfunctory to be of much use.

再者，科學本身可能會受到損害。如果研究人員為了一時權宜而走捷徑，或者在數據仍不足時就給予建議，也許會在不知不覺中讓他們所仰賴的科學程序染上污名。事實上，我在和摩爾斯談話后不久，讀到一份來自約翰霍普金斯大學彭博公共衛(wèi)生學院流行病學家和生物統(tǒng)計學家團隊的報告，內容暗示了很多早期研究過于草率，以至于用處不大。

The scholars analyzed the first 201 COVID-19 clinical trials, which had been conducted in China, the U.S., and other countries. It seemed there had been a lot of corner cutting. One-third of the trials had no clear definition of treatment success; nearly one-half were so small (100 or fewer patients) they weren't really informative; and two-thirds lacked the gold standard safeguard known as "blinding," which keeps investigators from knowing which subjects are getting the treatment under study.

團隊學者分析了在中國、美國和其他國家進行的最早201個COVID-19臨床試驗，發(fā)現似乎有許多便宜行事之處。其中三分之一沒有清楚定義何謂治療成功；將近一半樣本數太少（100名病患以下），無法說明什么；還有三分之二缺乏名為“遮盲”的黃金標準防護措施，它可避免研究人員知道哪些受試者正在接受研究中的治療方法。

These less-than-ideal clinical trials were reported anyway, partly because leading scientific journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine and those published by PLOS, had pledged to accelerate the peer review process, rushing coronavirus articles into print in half the usual time. Another avenue of publication involves preprint servers, which post articles online before they're peer-reviewed. These servers, created to promote transparency in scientific research, predate the pandemic, but they exploded in popularity as coronavirus studies were churned out.

但這些不盡理想的臨床試驗還是獲得報導，部分原因是像《新英格蘭醫(yī)學期刊》和公共科學圖書館的出版品等具權威的科學期刊，承諾會加速同儕審查過程，以平常一半的時間讓新冠病毒相關論文火速印刷出版。另一個出版途徑是預印本服務器，會在線上發(fā)布尚未經同儕審查的論文。這些服務器早在大流行前就存在，是為了促進科學研究透明化而創(chuàng)設，不過隨著新冠病毒的研究大量產出，它們也受到廣泛關注。