NIH Awarded More Than 56,000 Grants in 2020. Just 2 Percent Were for Studying COVID.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government approved an unprecedented amount of emergency spending in response to a new and poorly understood public health threat.

But the federal government's agency dedicated to actually studying public health threats was slow to respond.

In fact, just 2 percent of the more than 56,000 grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during 2020 went to projects studying COVID-19, even as the virus killed thousands of Americans and ransacked the global economy. That's the conclusion of a new study from...