George Davey Smith, FRS
Director, MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit
University of Bristol
Mendelian randomization: what (if anything) can it add to covid-19 research?
Mendelian randomization (MR) uses genetic variants reliably associated with traits that could be modified by pharmaceutical or lifestyle interventions to improve causal inference in observational data. Predictably there has been a plethora of studies applying MR to covid-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This talk will review methodological issues that arise in applying MR to an acute infectious disease such as covid-19, based on examples from reported studies.
