The Covid pandemic’s onset prompted speculation that the disease had been created in a lab in China, specifically as a weapon against the United States. This new and highly contagious virus did wreak profound socioeconomic trauma and widespread suffering, borne disproportionately by the disadvantaged. Initially it caused nearly 1.2 million deaths in the United States. But at the pandemic’s onset, the late Dr. Paul Farmer, of Harvard University, offered a different explanation for the virus’s toll:
We are facing the consequences of decades and decades of underinvestment in public health, and of centuries of misallocation of funds away from those who need that help most. All the social pathologies of our nation come to the fore during epidemics. And during a pandemic like this one, we’re going to be showing the rest of the world, warts and all, how…badly we can do.
The “lab leak” theory is fictitious, an attempt to divert attention from the situation that Farmer described, while vilifying an Asian country for geopolitical purposes. It blends ignorance, bigotry and denial with what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics: “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”
The 19th-century US nativist movements likewise saw their country as being besieged from abroad. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, warned in 1835 that Austria sought to install a Hapsburg as “Emperor of the United States.” Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, preached that “a great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions,” had been sent here by “the potentates of Europe.”
The modern far right sees threats within the United States, a land which, in Hofstadter’s words, “they are determined to repossess.” The German American Bund demanded in 1938 that “our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.” J. Edgar Hoover maintained an FBI file on Eleanor Roosevelt, whose support for civil rights, labor unions, and non-traditional gender roles apparently constituted a threat to national security. The John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower “a dedicated Communist,” while today a rising fascist paranoia is voiced by militias and QAnon, among others.
The “lab leak” theory combines these two fears: An external enemy more than seven thousand miles away sent to us a biological assassin. This theory receives respectful treatment in the mainstream U.S. news media, which described the efforts to create a Covid vaccine as a “global arms race.” Still, a connection to Dr. Farmer’s concerns has been made by a retired Navy medical officer, Pietro D. Marghella: “How can threats related to the nation’s public health not be considered threats to national security?” There is historical precedent: During the Boer War, 40 to 60 percent of British military recruits were rejected as physically unfit. Late in the First World War, prime minister Lloyd George concluded: “You cannot maintain an A-1 Empire with a C-3 population.”
More recent developments, such as bioweapons, AIDS, and global warming, have heightened awareness of the “globalized spread of disease risks, be they pathogens, products, or pollutants,” writes David P. Fidler, senior fellow for global health and cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thus, “viewing public health through the lens of security has become an integral aspect of public health governance in the 21st century.”
Yet the last fifty years have seen a steep drop in the number of staffed hospital beds, from 1.5 million to 674,000, and in hospitals, from 7,156 in 1975 to 6,120 in 2022. During the same time, the US population rose from 210 million to 333 million.
Today the federal government and some states have ended aid programs for those struggling with pandemic damage. By April 2024, 20 million people had lost their Medicaid coverage; proposed cuts would remove it from another 15 million people. And since well before the pandemic, “some 45,000 annual deaths [were] associated with a lack of health insurance,” according to the American Journal of Public Health.
All this is despite health researchers’ warnings. Dr. Peter J. Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, notes that “COVID-19 was the third major and serious coronavirus epidemic or pandemic following SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012, thus, we should anticipate a fourth coronavirus outbreak within the next decade or so.” Yet the Trump administration is actively subverting an already profoundly troubled health care system. “Disease cure research in the United States—for cancer, for Alzheimer’s disease, even for pediatric heart defects—has been stopped,” writes Professor Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Early in 2025, $2.7 billion was cut from the NIH and $739 million from the National Science Foundation, Gronvall notes. (The military’s FY 2026 budget is more than $1 trillion, plus $100 billion for intelligence agencies.)
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero’s populace was being decimated by a plague: “No sickness had ever been so deadly.” Thus, “when half the people of his land had died, he called to him a thousand healthy, happy friends, and with them went far away to live in one of his palaces. This was a large and beautiful stone building he had planned himself. A strong, high wall circled it.” Prospero soon held a lavish masked ball—into which, disguised as a partygoer, the Red Death entered, with grim results. Poe published this story in 1842. More than 180 years later, our current rulers—and their 77.3 million voters—appear to have learned nothing from it.