The Impact of COVID-19 on Disability Research: A 2022 Update

During the two years since the pandemic began, COVID-19 has had vast local, nationwide, and global impacts across all fields of federal research. These new implications for federal research include impacts to research institution finances, quality and efficiency, knowledge dissemination, preexisting disparities for researchers, research focus, and productivity. An updated estimate of the impact of the pandemic on federal research from March 2020 through February 2021 calculated a financial loss of $218 million and research output losses between 20 to 40 percent (Council on Government Relations, 2021). This paper provides an update to the first Interagency Committee on Disability Research (ICDR) COVID-19 white paper and presents recent information on how the field of disability research has changed and adapted throughout the pandemic, highlighting important areas of new research and how the shift to virtual research methods has modified the research landscape.