The Megaproject Race to Fight Covid-19. A Scientometric Assessment of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) International Funding

To fight Covid-19 developing a working vaccine has been a successful story of megaproject in science – a huge amount of money deployed to achieve timely a very specific solution. The main player worldwide has been the US Government that, mostly but not exclusively via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), funded research to develop vaccines against Covid-19, ending the facto the ongoing pandemic. We assess this megaproject taking a specific angle for the assessment of this specific type of research – the scientometric one. Considering the funding NIAID let have to international groups (international co-authorships), we examine which countries have been more competitive in publishing about Covid-19 under this funding agency, securing via “hot papers” (articles receiving rapidly many citations) an advantage at early stages of this scientific race. Results show the relevance of mostly European Western Countries in collaborating with this funding agency, showing overlapping effect between the mere scientific effort and geopolitical alliances.