THREAD: We must advance therapeutics fast. That requires proper clinical trials, through master protocol where patients in need are randomized to therapy that's already shown indication of effectiveness in earlier studies, but a crash program to scale up manufacturing in parallel
Focus must be on vaccines but also drugs and antibody prophylaxis that can be available much sooner. Antibody prophylaxis can protect front line providers and those at greatest risk and could be available at scale by summer in a best case. We've done it before. We can do it again
These products must be studied in proper trials to determine what works best but it can be done in clinical trial structures that enable broad access to patients in need who don’t have therapeutic options. We outline some of those approaches in this paper: healthpolicy.duke.edu/sites/default/…
As noted in @WSJ today, Sen. Daines proposed funding manufacturing and stockpiling of drugs and vaccines as soon as they’re developed but before approved. Once a drug or vaccine proves safe and effective, we’ll then have sufficient inventory to treat the population immediately 
It's smart policy. We should secure manufacturing and scale up now for products NIAID, BARDA, FDA deem promising enough to make it into the government administered trials. So, if one works we can provide on mass scale immediately, not have to wait months to scale manufacturing.
If we find out a drug or antibody prophylaxis works, we don't want to have to wait months and months to have a population level supply. The idea is to manufacture that supply in parallel. It's a modest investment relative to public health needs and gravity of our current crisis.
