It’s Time to Treat Pandemics as Threats to National Security, Experts Argue
The world spends enormous sums on national security, on militaries, intelligence agencies, and border protection. But the most damaging threat of the 21st century so far, according to a growing number of public health experts, has been biological, not military. And the tools and mindset used to address national security threats, they argue, should be applied to pandemic preparedness.
In a new opinion piece published in STAT News, physician and health policy expert David Blumenthal and political scientist James A. Morone make the case that pandemics should be formally treated as threats to national security, with the dedicated funding, institutional authority, and strategic planning that designation implies.
A Security Mindset for Public Health
The core of the argument is straightforward: infectious disease outbreaks can kill more people, cause more economic damage, and destabilize societies more rapidly than most conventional security threats. COVID-19 alone is estimated to have caused more than 7 million reported deaths globally, a figure that is almost certainly a significant undercount, and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
Yet pandemic preparedness is typically treated as a public health specialty rather than a national security priority. Funding for pandemic prevention and response is often piecemeal, reactive, and vulnerable to budget cycles. When the immediate crisis passes, political attention moves elsewhere, and the infrastructure built up in response is allowed to atrophy.
“A national security mindset can help prevent and minimize the damage of future pandemics,” Blumenthal and Morone write, arguing that the same strategic thinking applied to military threats, scenario planning, intelligence gathering, stockpiling, regular drills, and dedicated institutional structures, should be applied to biological threats.
What Would Change
Treating pandemics as national security threats would carry practical consequences. It would mean dedicated, multi-year funding that does not depend on the outbreak cycle. It would mean placing pandemic preparedness under institutional structures with the authority to compel action across government agencies, rather than leaving it to health departments that must negotiate for resources and cooperation.
It would also mean a different approach to intelligence and surveillance. Military and intelligence agencies routinely monitor global developments for signs of emerging threats. A national-security approach to pandemics would invest in similar capabilities for pathogen surveillance, monitoring wastewater, tracking unusual disease patterns, and analyzing genomic data in real time.
The authors draw on the U.S. experience with COVID-19, noting that the country’s fragmented public health system, inconsistent funding, and lack of centralized authority contributed to one of the worst outbreak outcomes among high-income countries. They argue that a national security framework would have compelled earlier and more coordinated action.
The Challenge of Sustained Attention
One of the central problems of pandemic preparedness is political: the threat is invisible between outbreaks, and the investments required are large. Defense budgets do not face the same problem, because military threats are assumed to be continuous even when no conflict is imminent.
Blumenthal and Morone argue that reframing pandemics as security threats would change this dynamic. If the same logic applied, that preparedness must be constant even when the threat is not visible, pandemic funding would become structurally stable rather than crisis-driven.
The opinion piece arrives at a moment when the world is still digesting the lessons of multiple recent outbreaks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2025 Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in Uganda. International health officials have repeatedly warned that the next pandemic could be more severe than COVID-19, and that the window for strengthening global preparedness is narrowing.
Whether the national security framing can shift political behavior, or whether pandemic preparedness will continue to follow the familiar pattern of panic and neglect, remains an open question. But the argument is gaining traction, and the authors hope it will help reshape how governments think about the threat.
Sources
[1] Blumenthal, D. and Morone, J.A. “It’s time to treat pandemics as threats to national security.” STAT News (First Opinion), 20 July 2026. https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/20/pandemics-national-security-threats/