  The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and
science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place
to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the
COVID-19 emergency. But on the flip side, research in many fields not directly
related to the pandemic has lagged behind. In this paper, we assess the impact
of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences. We investigate
how the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the
outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-differences approach the impact
of COVID-19 on scientific production through PubMed. We find that COVID-related
research topics have risen to prominence, displaced clinical publications,
diverted funds away from research areas not directly related to COVID-19 and
that the number of publications on clinical trials in unrelated fields has
contracted. Our results call for urgent targeted policy interventions to
reactivate biomedical research in areas that have been neglected by the
COVID-19 emergency.
