The European Union (EU) on Tuesday, 28 April, 194 million euros in funding to the G5 Sahel countries to strengthen their security forces. In a videoconference, EU leaders said they would favorably examine a request to cancel African debt to allow African countries to continue to combat Islamist terrorism as they are facing a new challenge in COVID-19.

While the world’s attention appropriately focuses on the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the threat of violent extremism remains, and has in some circumstances been exacerbated during the crisis. The moment demands new and renewed attention so that the gains made to date do not face setbacks. Eric Rosand, Khalid Koser, and Lilla Schumicky-Logan describe the six themes which their investigation shows as recurring.

Among the protesters who demonstrated in several state capitals for ending the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, there were a noticeable number of far-right conspiracy theorists, white supremacists like Proud Boys and citizens’ militia members. As researchers of street gangs’ and far-right groups’ violence and recruitment, we believe these protests may become a way right-wingers expand the spread of anti-Semitic rhetoric and militant racism. Proud Boys, and many other far-right activists, don’t typically focus their concern on whether stores and businesses are open. They’re attending these rallies as part of their longstanding search for any opportunity to make extremist groups look mainstream – and because they are always looking for potential recruits to further their cause.

The coronavirus pandemic and its social repercussions are fueling violence by both frustrated individuals and domestic terrorists, according to a new intelligence report by the Department of Homeland Security. Social distancing has meant the cancelation of mass gathering events that are historically appealing targets for both international and domestic terrorists, the report adds, but “the pandemic has created a new source of anger and frustration for some individuals. As a result, violent extremist plots will likely involve individuals seeking targets symbolic to their personal grievances.”

The leaders of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) said that already in the first few months since the global breakout of the Coronavirus, there has been a rise in antisemitic manifestations relating to the spread of the disease and the economic recession triggered by the pandemic. “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant rise in accusations that Jews, as individuals and as a collective, are behind the spread of the virus or are directly profiting from it,” Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the EJC, said.

Germs have killed more people than all the wars in history, and people have been trying to make use of them throughout all those wars. In the U.S., we have seen small-scale bioterrorist attacks – the Rajneeshee poisoning of restaurants in 1986 and the Amerithrax letters that were mailed in 2001. Still, the years running up to this current coronavirus pandemic not only saw the gutting of U.S. national health institutions but also a cultural groundswell of science denial in the anti-vaccination movement. Today the United States in particular is paying for that denial in livelihoods and lives. The warnings were clear. If 9/11 was a “failure of imagination,” then history will no doubt judge the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 as a failure of courage, compassion, and, most of all, competence.

Can one form of extremism feed off and magnify other forms of extremism? Is there a positive extremist feedback loop, and, if so, can a cumulative perspective on extremism help us understand the ebb and flow of political violence, radicalization, and mobilization? The left- and right-wing extremism in Europe in the last four decades does exhibit an interdependency between mutually hostile movements, and the study of mutually reinforcing forms of extremism in Denmark offers a microcosm of a broader phenomenon.

MI5 is aware of more than 43,000 people who pose a potential terrorist threat to the U.K., according to a government report — almost twice the number of terror suspects previously disclosed. David Gadher writes that after the 2017 attacks at London Bridge and Manchester Arena, it was revealed that MI5 had about 23,000 current and historic suspects on its radar, divided into 3,000 subjects of interest (SOIs), and 20,000 closed” subjects of interest (CSOIs). The Home Office has been quietly recategorizing its lists, and now says that there are 40,000 CSOIs, “where MI5 judges there to be some risk of re-engaging in terrorist activity.”

Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the current coronavirus pandemic is how to learn future lessons without having to experience a pandemic, whether natural in origin or made by humans. We must rethink and test assumptions about relationships between biological research, security, and society to plan for biosecurity threats.