The urgency of vaccine development during the pandemic brought research spending into public view as rarely before. Headlines trumpeted billion-dollar pledges, but behind every news release was a web of laboratories, biotech firms, and academic partners. For economists and policy analysts wanting to trace where the money actually went—and how much of it targeted vaccines versus other scientific pursuits—ISIC 7210, covering research and experimental development on natural sciences, offers a much-needed anchor.
The challenge begins with data collection. Firms and institutions registered under ISIC 7210 are, by definition, engaged in some form of scientific R&D. Government statistics offices and industry associations are a good first port of call for collecting reported R&D spending, often published as annual totals or sometimes broken out by project category. Major firms—especially those publicly traded—typically report aggregate R&D outlays in their financial statements. Smaller players, academic labs, or start-ups might disclose through grant reports, project summaries, or consortia publications.
But, as with all things research, the next step is disaggregation. Not all R&D under ISIC 7210 is vaccine-related. Even in a pandemic, institutes work on diagnostics, cancer therapies, agricultural biotech, and more. Allocating total expenditures between vaccine and non-vaccine projects is where the real work starts. This usually involves a mix of approaches: reading project descriptions, coding budget lines from annual reports, or requesting more granular data through industry surveys.
Some countries have started to require explicit R&D project tagging—flagging which investments go into vaccine candidates or related technologies. Where this isn’t available, analysts may have to build their own mapping, correlating reported expenditure with major clinical trial registrations or patent filings. In some cases, industry partnerships and public grant announcements help fill in gaps—showing which firms pivoted resources rapidly toward COVID-19 vaccines and which stayed their course in other areas.
It’s rarely precise. Budgets shift mid-year, projects overlap, and indirect spending on shared infrastructure muddies the accounting. Some firms use “platform” technologies that support both vaccine and non-vaccine R&D, complicating the split. Yet, even rough estimates grounded in ISIC 7210 allow for comparisons: Who ramped up spending fastest? Which regions or firm types contributed the most to the global vaccine effort? Did smaller firms play a different role from pharmaceutical giants?
The resulting picture is a blend of scale and nuance. Major vaccine developers dominated headlines and funding, but a long tail of small and midsize ISIC 7210 firms contributed crucial discoveries, production tools, and regulatory expertise. Analysts who follow the money at this level see not just the breadth of the response, but the intricacy of collaboration—and sometimes, the bottlenecks that slowed progress.
There’s always a margin for error in this kind of tracking, but the value lies in bringing clarity to a field that, by nature, is messy and in flux. By anchoring research spending in a systematic framework, it becomes possible to move past anecdotes and ask sharper questions—about efficiency, gaps, and the paths not taken in a historic global research sprint. For those looking to improve how we fund and focus scientific discovery, that clarity isn’t just useful; it’s essential for what comes next.