Cochrane review A122: what filled the Cochrane basket when A122 was delayed?

How Archie Cochrane’s agenda was trashed

Let’s take one the founding principles of the then Cochrane Collaboration:“minimising bias”. Let’s set it into the context of the often reported events surrounding Cochrane review A122 (Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses).

The review was started in 2006 and has been updated five times, the last time in January 2023.

We looked at ten Cochrane Reviews published during or around the A122 delay gap, we extracted the search date and publication date and calculated the days from the search to publication. We then extracted the data for the included study designs (see the table). 

The shortest time to publication was within 26 days of the search; the longest was 477 days (median 82 days). For one review, we couldn’t make sense of the date as the publication came before the search.

The longest time was spent on a scoping review of the Unintended consequences of measures implemented in the school setting to contain the COVID‐19 pandemic. Given the impor…