Research teams worked separately to investigate similar problems when combined studies might have delivered meaningful results

Australia’s energetic Covid research response has been blighted by waste, with clinical trials undermined by parochialism, poor coordination, privacy constraints and skewed priorities.

A review of Covid trials launched in Australia last year has found that many were “underpowered”, enlisting too few participants to generate meaningful results and failing to compensate by recruiting overseas or sharing data.

The findings, published by a University of Sydney team in the Medical Journal of Australia, echo concerns that researchers have ignored sociological aspects of the coronavirus crisis in a rush to unpack Covid’s biological secrets. Experts say that human and government behaviour, which can be far less predictable than the virus, has been implicated in some of the crisis’ most disastrous developments.

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