"No—Peter Doshi and David Healy
The trust we place in licensed medicines is a strong reason for insisting on full data transparency and reporting, even in the face of a pandemic. Few would disagree with the importance of data transparency, but even during normal times it remains a challenge—so, why demand it during a pandemic? The reason is that data transparency builds the foundation for information we can trust. Data secrecy, by contrast, creates risks too large to take...
Placing our trust in data secrecy
... Before any covid-19 treatment or vaccine is made widely available, study protocols should be in the public domain, along with statistical analysis plans, clinical study reports, patient level data, and copies of the correspondence with regulators and other key stakeholders.
Data transparency is not a 'nice to have.' Claims made without access to the data—whether appearing in peer reviewed publications or in preprints without peer review—are not scientific claims. Products can be marketed without access to the data, but doctors and professional societies should publicly state that, without complete data transparency, they will refuse to endorse covid-19 products as being based on science."
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