The depressing thing for anyone interested in rigorous science and evidence these days is that you are constantly cast as a pessimist who is holding up progress. The opposite is true: Good, steady, and sometimes slow, science, speeds things up.

Where did all the optimism on hydroxychloroquine get us? The world wasted huge amounts of energy investigating this one drug even when a lot of evidence was already stacked against it. Thousands of patients could have received more promising experimental therapeutics but didn’t.

Getting good, clear answers through rigorous science that allow us to rule in or rule out certain options are the fastest way out of this mess. UK's Recovery Trial has done more on this front than hundreds of trials put together. US could have done similar.

Instead, Trump and others like to cast themselves as people speeding things up and removing roadblocks. But politicising decisions that should be based on evidence in this way undermines trust in the whole system and hampers our fight against #covid19.