Covid-19 has been a historic pandemic that has killed over 6 million people around the globe, from March 2020 to March 2022. It has been a phenomenon that the world has not seen for at least 100 years. The pandemic was associated with large economic impacts, individual impacts in terms of physical and mental health, and social impacts across many facets of society. The pandemic also happened while societies around the world have been experiencing political polarization, and the decentralization of news and information with social media and other online technologies. This decentralization, and in a sense liberalization, of the use of information and communication technologies has brought about issues of misinformation and disinformation. In particular, as development of vaccines to treat Covid-19 became a central issue in the pandemic, scientific uncertainty, developing information, political bigotry and outright false information all mixed together to create confusion, overconfidence and exacerbated political tensions.
As the pandemic continues, much research has been published about Covid-19 vaccines which can provide reliable information about the effectiveness and potential harms of this preventive therapy. However, due to the large amount of research and difficulty in searching and sorting the scientific literature, we have developed CoVaR: the Covid-19 Vaccine Research database and application. CoVaR collects, organizes, summarizes, and filters scientific studies related to the Covid-19 vaccines. CoVaR displays reliable and helpful information about the current scientific knowledge on this medicine. It provides a user-friendly website that facilitates searching and analyzing the body of research on Covid-19 vaccines.
We hope CoVaR can highlight the efforts of researchers on vaccines for Covid-19, help people understand the results of scientific studies on the vaccines, and provide a non-partisan source of information for scientists and the public alike. We hope to motivate people to make informed decisions about their health, the nature of the Covid-19 disease, and the treatments available to them.
CoVaR was conceptualized by Nic DePaula, Assistant Professor at Wayne State University, and developed by James Daniel, Shoumik Das, Murtaza Ali and Anush Rajam as part of their 2022 Senior Capstone Project. CoVaR pulls information from PubMed and MedRxiv, stores content in a document database, and categorizes content based on major topics of interest. The application also produces analytics on the breadth of the information collected. Further details about the application can be found at:https://github.com/lhei-git/covar
We welcome you to visit our website and explore the wealth of information that we have gathered.
