Budget and other project documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show how the National Institutes of Health set up its flagship long Covid research initiative, including the scientific expertise that government reviewers prioritized in selecting research teams to lead the RECOVER program and the early goals and timelines. Experts who reviewed the contracts and project documents say the agency set itself up for failure.

A powerful Democratic lawmaker is interrogating the National Institutes of Health over its slow progress in addressing long Covid, citing a recent STAT and MuckRock investigation into the agency’s lack of urgency.

Have you been reporting on COVID, or do you have COVID-related documents on DocumentCloud? MuckRock invites you to contribute your documents to a public digital archive to help journalists, researchers and historians tell the stories of the pandemic.

With the help of maternal mortality experts, MuckRock is releasing a first-of-its-kind dataset that includes nationwide and a selection of statewide data on maternal deaths during the pandemic. We’re also asking for people who have experienced the death of a family member or friend from pregnancy-related complications to tell us their stories.

The comments from a senior New York City environment official overseeing its wastewater surveillance program represent a sharp departure from a joint statement made to MuckRock and the Gothamist last month by the city’s health and environment agencies, which called wastewater surveillance a “developing field,” stressing a need for further research before it could be used to inform policy action.

Unspecific, unknown deaths rose 10 times more among Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people than among white Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new analysis by MuckRock. The true toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on many communities of color is worse than previously known.

Nearly three years into the city’s wastewater surveillance program, New York City has neither a local dashboard nor a clear strategy for how testing results are used.

In a first-of-its-kind analysis, we have detailed death certificate records in Chicago; California’s Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego; Minnesota; and New Mexico, allowing us to search for words associated with Long COVID. Here’s what we found.

In its award announcement, the Institute for Nonprofit News noted that “this collaboration among five newsrooms revealed stark disparities in the way medical examiners reported cause of death during the pandemic and introduced a new method of analyzing mortality data.”

Columbia University’s Documenting COVID-19 project, MuckRock and the Missouri Independent won two first-place prizes for its COVID-19 pandemic and health coverage in the 2022 Missouri Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest.