The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2021 · 10.1016/s1473-3099(21)00485-0
INCONCLUSIVE
DisCoVeRy was a large, properly randomised European hospital trial (857 people enrolled, 832 analysed) that tested whether adding the antiviral remdesivir to normal COVID-19 care helped patients already sick enough to need oxygen. The honest answer it reports is: it did not move the main outcome. On the pre-specified primary endpoint — a patient's clinical status at day 15 on a 7-point scale from 'home and well' to 'dead' — the two groups were essentially identical (odds ratio 0.98, p=0.85). Deaths were the same (about 5-6% by day 15 in each arm). The trial does what good science is supposed to do: it asked a clear question, got a null answer, and led with that null answer instead of hiding it. There is one eye-catching secondary result — patients not already on a ventilator progressed to mechanical ventilation, ECMO or death less often on remdesivir (18% vs 25% overall; 29% vs 51% in the sickest stratum) — but this is a secondary endpoint among roughly fifteen, in an unblinded (open-label) trial where the decision to escalate a patient to a ventilator is a human judgement that can be nudged by knowing the treatment. So that signal is a genuine, pre-registered hypothesis worth chasing, not proof. Nothing in the paper is arithmetically broken, the numbers reconcile, and the registered primary outcome is exactly the one that was published. The paper holds up.
No flags were filed as separate structured items — the assessment above carries the finding. A verdict is never “held up” while an integrity issue stands.
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