This paper presents new evidence on the size and direction of governments’ R&D funding response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the exploration of a novel data infrastructure, the OECD Fundstat initiative for the analysis of government-funded R&D projects. The document reports on the exploratory development and application of automatic classification tools to detect relevant COVID-19 R&D funding, map salient topics and classify and allocate project funding according to priorities in the WHO COVID-19 R&D Blueprint, as well as comparing results with similar analysis of scientific publication output data. The results provide new insights on which areas of enquiry were prioritised by governmental R&D funding bodies.