Intelligence & epidemicsWas the Coronavirus Outbreak an Intelligence Failure?

By Erik J. Dahl

Published 16 June 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold, it’s clear that having better information sooner, and acting more quickly on what was known, could have slowed the spread of the outbreak and saved more people’s lives. Initial indications are that the U.S. intelligence community did well in reporting on the virus once news of the outbreak in China became widely known by early January. Whether it could have done more before that time, and why the Trump administration did not act more decisively early on, will have to wait for a future national coronavirus commission to help us sort out.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold, it’s clear that having better information sooner, and acting more quickly on what was known, could have slowed the spread of the outbreak and saved more people’s lives.

There may be finger-pointing about who should have done better – and President Donald Trump has already begun laying blame. But as a former naval intelligence officer who teaches and studies the U.S. intelligence community, I believe it’s useful to look at the whole process of how information about diseases gets collected and processed, by the U.S. government but also by many other organizations around the world.

The Role of Traditional U.S. Intelligence Agencies
The U.S. intelligence community has for many years considered the possible threat of disease among the potential risks to national stability and security.

For instance, then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress in January 2019 that a large-scale outbreak “could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

The traditional national-security intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the National Security Agency, can be useful in tracking pandemics once they are identified, using human informants and other sensitive intelligence sources to determine where an outbreak developed and what other nations have done in response.

But the main burden for pandemic detection within the intelligence community falls on little-known agencies, like the National Center for Medical Intelligence. It is a part of the Department of Defense that tracks emerging diseases, bioterrorist threats and the medical capabilities of other countries.

U.S. Domestic Medical Intelligence Gathering
Beyond the intelligence community, the U.S. has a complex system of civilian medical and public-health information collection, coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC manages some 100 different health surveillance systems, including collecting data from local and state health officials on particularly important diseases such as anthrax, cholera and Ebola, through the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. The CDC also gathers information from medical facilities and public health departments on potentially dangerous health symptoms before they have been diagnosed by medical experts, in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program.

International Medical Surveillance Systems
The World Health Organization sits atop an even more complex network of international health and disease surveillance systems. For example, its Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network attempts to identify outbreaks in developing countries. But the WHO does not have its own medical intelligence system; its role