Abstract: Under the impact of major public health events, the current speed and direction of scientific and technological development have burst out with new characteristics. Based on the theory and empirical basis of disaster economics, this paper selects multiple groups of panel and time series data, and uses the composite control method, breakpoint regression and vector autoregressive model to investigate the inducement and reverse effect of modern disasters on technological innovation from two aspects of medical technology and digital technology. The research findings are as follows: (1) The COVID-19 not only induced technological progress in medical related fields, but also forced the application and innovation of digital technology; (2) In the short term, the negative impact of the increase in epidemic intensity on innovation will reach its peak within one and a half months, but the significance of the impact will decrease rapidly after that, and the negative impact will gradually converge to the zero level; (3) At the international level, compared with the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea, the induced effect and anti-driving effect of the epidemic on scientific and technological innovation are more significant in China, showing the resilience of China's scientific and technological development in the context of the epidemic. The research conclusion reveals the conditional impact of modern epidemic on scientific and technological innovation, and also provides reference value for the construction of China's emergency innovation system, social digital transformation and international scientific and technological competition in the post-epidemic era.