The race to develop coronavirus treatments pushes the ethics of clinical trials

The race to develop coronavirus treatments pushes the ethics of clinical trials

The path to approving a clinical drug is a long, extremely expensive one. Then it takes several more years to prove a drug’s safety, transition to human testing, and finally to test efficacy in large groups. There are no clinically approved drugs to treat the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19; before December, there was no known virus to test a drug on, let alone spend years investigating.