COVID-19 produced an 'unprecedented' shift in scientific priorities

When Ed Yong's latest pandemic-related feature in The Atlantic was published Monday, he reported that the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-19-related scientific papers. That sounds like a lot by itself for a virus that was discovered only a year ago, but when contextualized the figure becomes even more staggering. It's more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, and dengue, all diseases that have been around for centuries, and there are only 9,700 papers related to Ebola, which was discovered in 1976.

Of course, some of that has to do with the fact that there are simply more scientists these days. Still, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told Yong "the way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented." Madhukar Pai of McGill University added that "nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that's happening right now."

Some of that will likely come in handy — scientists told Yong they believe it will change the way their community prepares for future pandemics, and it could also enhance the general understanding of infectious diseases. Vaccine development, which occurred at historic pace this year, will also likely benefit from the precedent set by the pandemic. But the singular focus on the coronavirus could also set back other fields, like zoology or conservation sciences, which saw frequent cancellations in research. Read more at The Atlantic.

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