Funding and undertaking research during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Funding and undertaking research during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic: COVID CIRCLE updated report January 2023 COVID CIRCLE: Funding and undertaking research during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic 1 This report provides specific recommendations for action by funders to improve the implementation of the Funders Principles both for the ongoing pandemic and for future epi. [...] This initiative delivered the UK research funders’ following aims: to create a community of practice for researchers addressing LMIC-focused research questions, to facilitate the reach of this research to the WHO and further policy makers, to improve and maintain the COVID-19 Funded Research Project Tracker, and to develop the living funding data analyses. [...] Across the five thematic pillars identified in the UN Research Roadmap, the ‘Social protection and basic services’ pillar had the largest number of associated research projects, with the ‘Health systems and services’ pillar ranking second in terms of the total number of research projects (although this pillar had the highest known research funding attached to it). [...] Interestingly, while the peak increase in the number of LMIC-focused projects occurred earlier than for the rest of the database, further examination of the timeline reveals that the research response was slower to pivot to issues addressing the COVID-19 recovery and post-pandemic world for LMIC-focused projects than for the rest of the database (Figure 2). [...] While the summer of 2020 saw the largest increases in the number of projects ad- dressing the pillars in the UNRR, the cumulative progression was slower for LMIC-focused projects than for the rest of the database, as more than half of the dated LMIC-focused projects had publication dates from October 2020 onwards (52.2%), whereas just over a third of the rest of the database did so (34.9%).