Covid Killed 1.2M: Why Pandemics Are Security Threats
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- Covid-19 killed over 1.2 million Americans from 2020 to 2026, compared to just over 1.3 million Americans killed in all the nation's wars across 250 years—and the disease 'savaged' the economy, set back a generation of children's education, and inflamed political divisions.
- The White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (OPPR), created by Congress after Covid, received no funding and is now 'virtually defunct,' leaving the White House structurally underprepared for the next infectious threat.
- The National Security Council had no standing biosecurity expertise when Covid struck, and the NSA offered CDC officials little help in extracting outbreak information from secretive Chinese authorities, according to the authors' new book.
- A former Wall Street Journal reporter on the NSC staff who spoke Mandarin and tracked Chinese social media crashed President Trump's January 2020 daily briefing to warn that Covid would be his presidency's top national security threat—while the formal intelligence briefers were caught flat-footed.
- The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), credited with helping develop Covid vaccines, has been hemorrhaging staff and lacks a permanent director amid the administration's attacks on federal research, the authors note.
- The authors prescribe eight reforms: fund the OPPR, embed disease surveillance into the intelligence community's daily work, revitalize the CDC's international footprint, build medical surge capacity, sustain mRNA and antimicrobial R&D, and rehearse a national pandemic playbook the way the military drills contingency plans.
Why it matters: The post-Covid apparatus meant to guard against the next outbreak is already withering: the OPPR is virtually defunct, NIAID lacks a permanent director, and the intelligence community still doesn't treat pandemics as in-scope—gaps that left the US blindsided last time despite Covid deaths rivaling all US war deaths since the founding. With AI potentially enabling engineered pathogens, the institutional cost of inaction has rarely been higher or better documented.
