Clinical trials as theater

A recurring design pattern in politicized medicine is running long, universally‑offer trials that deliberately delay definitive answers and ensure eventual universal access to the intervention. Such trials can function to postpone accountability, re‑entrench contested treatments, and recreate—at high cost—data that already exist but were never analyzed. — If trials become a way to defer scrutiny rather than to resolve uncertainty, regulators, funders, and courts need rules (data linkage mandates, fast‑track analyses, prespecified stopping criteria) to prevent research from becoming policy theater.