Health security intelligence

Health Security Intelligence introduces readers to the world of health security, to threats like COVID-19, and to the many other incarnations of global health security threats and their implications for intelligence and national security. Disease outbreaks like COVID-19 have not historically been considered a national security matter.

While disease outbreaks among troops have always been a concern, it was the potential that arose in the first half of the twentieth century to systematically design biological weapons and to develop these at an industrial scale, that initially drew the attention of security, defence and intelligence communities to biology and medical science.

This book charts the evolution of public health and biosecurity threats from those early days, tracing how perceptions of these threats have expanded from deliberately introduced disease outbreaks to also incorporate natural disease outbreaks, the unintended consequences of research, laboratory accidents, and the convergence of emerging technologies.

This spectrum of threats has led to an expansion of the stakeholders, tools and sources involved in intelligence gathering and threat assessments.

This edited volume is a landmark in efforts to develop a multidisciplinary, empirically informed, and policy-relevant approach to intelligence-academia engagement in global health security that serves both the intelligence community and scholars from a broad range of disciplines.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Intelligence and National Security.