COVID-19 plasma treatments may be safe, but we don’t know if they work
With emergency permission for using plasma donated by recovered COVID-19 patients to treat sick ones, some researchers are once again raising concerns that the push for speed is getting ahead of the science. No randomized controlled trials have shown that convalescent plasma works against COVID-19 yet. Even so, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced August 23 that it would allow convalescent plasma to be used under an emergency use authorization. That move has some experts worried that an unproven treatment may interfere with other more promising therapies, and may make it harder to find out if convalescent plasma really can help against COVID-19. The authorization came less than a week after the New York Times reported that top National Institutes of Health officials were trying to stop an emergency use authorization for plasma, citing concerns about lack of sufficient data. On August 22, President Donald Trump tweeted dissatisfaction with the pace...