[cyphar]

As I said, ideally RCTs would run for as long as possible. But in meatspace we cannot ignore that if a treatment shows serious promise it is unethical to deprive control group patients of the treatment. If we ran RCTs for all CoVID-19 treatments for something like 3 years before using any treatment, it seems pretty apparent we'd be looking at a significantly higher death toll.

My point about it being solid science is not that it is a good (from a scientific perspective) to end trials early, merely that the early part of the trial was still an RCT and the data is just as solid as any other RCT which ran for the same period of time. From what I've seen, this is a contentious topic in academia because the ethics of this make it harder to argue that RCTs should always be run to completion (with no exceptions).

But any good RCT will have a stopping criteria established before the trial starts to eliminate ex-post-facto cherry-picking. I'm not familiar with the exact details of the Remdesivir trial and whether they had a reasonable stopping criteria defined beforehand -- I was speaking more broadly about the topic of ending RCTs early.