The United States built a rigorous system over decades to protect patients from harm while receiving new types of medical treatment. New drugs and new vaccines, in particular, have been barred from widespread use until they have first been proven to work and be safe. Many therapies have flunked the test, and in the process experimental subjects, human lives, have been lost. That is the price of progress, a price we as a society have accepted. At least up to now.

But as the planet reels from the novel coronavirus pandemic, will haste lay waste to proven approaches to ensuring the quality and safety of medical therapies?

Finding ways to prevent Covid-19 with a vaccine or to treat it with drugs has become a cause beyond urgent as the disease inflicts a terrible toll on people’s lives and livelihoods. But expediency — however compassionate — and magical thinking cannot carry this day. It may unleash unacceptable long-term consequences in the $3.5 trillion health care system that is supposed to take care of us.

Those who neglect the past may not be doomed to repeat its errors exactly. With medical science, however, a harsh record exists to remind us why a rush for remedies can be calamitous in both the short and long term. We need to look to the past to protect ourselves in the days ahead, and to be savvy, skeptical patient-consumers, so we don’t get infected with viral mis- or dis-information.