Opinion: It’s time to treat pandemics as threats to national security

OpinionFirst Opinion It’s time to treat pandemics as threats to national security A national security mindset can help prevent and minimize the damage of future pandemics Manage alerts for this article Email this article Share this article By David Blumenthal and James A. MoroneJuly 20, 2026 Blumenthal and Morone are the authors of “Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science.” Pandemics like the great influenza of 1918-1919 and Covid-19 are often viewed and treated as health care challenges. That view, however, is far too narrow. They should be viewed and combated as threats to national security, too. Why treat pandemics as national security threats? Because that’s what they are. Framing the danger this way would inform and motivate reforms that strengthen our pandemic defenses and reduce the devastation pandemics inflict.Advertisement Though definitions of national security can vary, the U.S. Congressional Research Service notes that it may encompass protecting a diverse range of critical national interests, ranging from counterterrorism to economic welfare to supply chain security to global public health. By this standard, Covid was an unparalleled national security disaster. In the 250 years since America’s founding, all the nation’s wars combined claimed just over 1.3 million lives. From 2020 to 2026, Covid-19 took over 1.2 million. The disease savaged the American economy, set back the education of a generation of American children, inflamed political divisions, and undermined confidence in vital public health protections, including vaccination. The events of Sept. 11, tragic as they were, pale in comparison. And all this happened despite the near miracle of effective Covid vaccines developed in 11 months. The next pandemic could be worse. For one thing, artificial intelligence could enable rogue actors to design new, potentially devastating pathogens at scale. We certainly can’t count on Operation Warp Speed-style successes to tame future contagions. Yet we assign far lower priority to defending against these infectious dangers than to terrorist threats that, worrisome as they are, have never inflicted anything like Covid’s damage on the American homeland. (Just think about airport security.)Advertisement Recognizing the national security implications of threatened pandemics would establish a framework for a much-needed top-to-bottom review of our approach to infectious threats. This should start in the White House. Preventing and responding to threatened pandemics requires society-wide mobilization, and only the president can lead that process. Presidents, therefore, need the same or better-quality advice and support for pandemic defense as they get for military and terrorist threats. The National Security Council (NSC) is the president’s go-to resource to protect national security, but when Covid struck, the NSC had no standing expertise on biosecurity. After Covid subsided, Congress tried to fill this NSC gap by legislating a new White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response but provided no funding to staff it. The OPPR is now virtually defunct. The White House remains underprepared to manage infectious threats. A national security orientation would also highlight the need for our intelligence community to participate more effectively in international infectious disease surveillance and response. As we report in our new book “Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science,” when officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had trouble getting information on Covid from secretive Chinese authorities, they got little assistance from the National Security Agency or the rest of the intelligence community, which did not regard pandemics as their problem. The president first learned the full extent of the threat almost by chance. A member of the NSC staff, who had no health expertise or responsibility, happened to be a former Wall Street Journal reporter in China who spoke Mandarin fluently and had maintained Chinese contacts. He followed the rising panic on Chinese social media about the outbreak in Wuhan. Uninvited, he crashed one of the President Trump’s daily national security briefings in late January 2020 to warn him — correctly — that Covid would constitute the most important national security threat of his presidency. The president’s formal intelligence briefers were caught flat-footed.Advertisement To prevent and minimize the damage of future pandemics, leaders at every level need to take the following steps: First, build a reliable, permanent biosecurity advisory structure within the White House that is available to key administration officials, including the president. This should start by funding and fully staffing the OPPR. The president could do this using discretionary funds for White House staffing or, even better, Congress could appropriate the necessary monies. Second, build disease surveillance into the intelligence community’s activities and reporting. There are already some low-level units monitoring emerging infections, such as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) located in the Defense Intelligence Agency. These units ought to be expanded and plugged into the nation’s mainstream intelligence work, right up to the president’s daily briefing. Third, revitalize the CDC, which remains our primary source of real-time expert information on infectious threats to the U.S. To be effective, however, the CDC must be adequately funded and staffed, and in particular, needs to have much more robust international resources. Revitalizing the CDC is critical to the fourth step: increasing capacity to detect and contain contagions as they emerge, often in distant reaches of the globe like the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ebola) or Argentina (hantavirus). The CDC has helped low- and middle-income countries with this task in the past, but the United States’ withdrawal from international alliances, and staff and budget cuts, have strained CDC’s ability to continue this vital, unheralded work. These international investments provide our only equivalent to the vast electronic and human intelligence programs used to detect and deter hostile foreign military threats. Stopping pandemics as they arise around the globe is the best way to protect the American homeland. Fifth, we need the equivalent of a civil defense infrastructure to contain infectious threats when they penetrate the homeland. The recent creation of a new federal Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in the Department of Health and Human Services is a step in the right direction, but state and local public health authorities are critical to pandemic management. Accused of overreach by the medical freedom movement galvanized by Covid restrictions, many have less funding, capacity, and authority to deal with pandemics than when Covid struck. They lack full-time epidemiologists, computerized information systems, sufficient staff, and public trust.Advertisement Sixth, build surge capacity into the medical system. During Covid, private health care providers — hospitals and clinics — proved unprepared to manage the deluge of new patients. Seventh, deploy pandemic research and development to produce medical and nonmedical measures that can prevent and contain infection. Despite the continuing controversy surrounding mRNA vaccines, they offer a promising technology for rapidly producing vaccines effective against novel pathogens, as they did against SARS CoV-2. R&D should also focus on developing more and better antimicrobial treatments, like Paxlovid, that are stockpiled and ready to dispense, and we need urgently to study dispassionately the benefits and risks of nonmedical measures used to contain Covid: masking, school closures, and lockdowns. Unfortunately, research-and-development to prevent pandemics has been caught up in the administration’s attack on the federal research establishment. The internationally respected National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which played a critical role in developing Covid vaccines, has been hemorrhaging staff and lacks a permanent director. Finally, to knit together these national security reforms, we need a national playbook for pandemic preparedness and response so that we’re not just making it up each time contagion threatens. The U.S. military has contingency plans for every conceivable military challenge and regularly practices many of them. Dealing with pandemics demands the same level of preparedness. Pandemic plans should be repeatedly rehearsed with all critical participants, public and private, from the White House down to local public health agencies. These reforms may seem a tall order, especially since Americans appear to be in near-total pandemic denial and anxious to put the Covid experience behind them. But health and national security leaders cannot afford the same complacency. As we enter our country’s 251st year, there is no greater threat to the nation’s welfare than the next looming pandemic.Advertisement David Blumenthal is professor of practice of public health and health policy at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and former president of the Commonwealth Fund. James A. Morone is John Hazen White professor of political science, public policy, and urban studies emeritus at Brown University. Letter to the editor Have an opinion on this essay? Submit a letter to the editor. global health, infectious diseases, Policy, public health Submit a correction requestReprints David Blumenthal James A. 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