Why Long COVID Fails to Register as a Security Threat

Long COVID affects millions of people worldwide and, according to a new commentary published in Globalization and Health, poses a serious threat to public health and economic stability, yet it remains largely absent from contemporary security agendas. Philip Finkelstein argues that the condition’s chronic, diffuse nature creates a temporal mismatch with security frameworks designed for acute, visible crises. Using the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory and Olaf Corry’s concept of “riskification,” the paper examines how structural, normative, and political obstacles prevent Long COVID from being framed as an existential threat, and what this reveals about the limits of prevailing security thinking.

The core problem, the commentary suggests, lies in the difficulty of constructing chronic disability as a collective harm within dominant security imaginaries. Security paradigms privilege acute mortality and visible disruption over gradual, accumulating damage. The paper concludes that the limitation lies less in securitization theory itself than in the conceptions of security that decide which harms qualify as existential and which remain categorized as routine policy concerns.

To illustrate these dynamics, the author compares the response to Long COVID with that of climate change and acute COVID-19. Both comparisons reveal how scientific uncertainty, fragmented governance, and limited public awareness undermine mobilization. Given the evolving science and contested definitions surrounding Long COVID, prevalence and prognosis estimates remain provisional, but they still serve as early indicators of how labor markets, healthcare systems, and a state’s overall resilience can be insidiously strained. The parallel with climate change shows how scientific consensus, public awareness, cultural attitudes, institutional capacity, competing interests, global inequities, and the tension between state sovereignty and collective action shape what becomes securitized.

Political conditions further diminish the prospects for successful securitizing moves. In the United States, reluctance to lead internationally, domestic political fragmentation, and a cultural emphasis on individual responsibility all work against framing Long COVID as a shared security concern. At the international level, institutions such as the UN and WHO exhibit similar inertia, attributed to ambiguous mandates and competing priorities. The commentary notes that the limited integration of Long COVID into security discourse, across both states and international organizations, reflects not merely political inertia but patterned assumptions embedded in state-centric, economically self-interested, and conflict-oriented security paradigms, as well as international frameworks that prioritize immediate and clearly bounded threats.

The paper closes with a diagnostic rather than prescriptive claim: political conceptions of security should better account for chronic harm and disability. Because similar slow-onset disabling conditions may emerge in future biological crises, prevailing security conceptions could leave societies insufficiently prepared. The author stresses that action need not entail militarized health governance or emergency rule; it requires political actors to recognize slow-onset, mass-disabling harms as potential collective security concerns. The value of a security framing, he argues, extends beyond increased funding for biomedical research to translating chronic disability into a collective concern capable of generating public urgency and sustained cross-sector mobilization. Without such a shift, security logics risk remaining inattentive to vulnerabilities that accumulate gradually among individuals yet carry profound delayed-onset implications for society at large. Further research, the commentary concludes, is needed on how security thinking might be recalibrated to support long-term care, equity, and resilience rather than emergency governance alone. As a historical precedent, the securitization of HIV/AIDS at the UN Security Council in 2000 illustrates both the mobilizing potential and the normative tradeoffs of framing disease as security.

Subject of Research: Why Long COVID resists securitization within existing national and international security frameworks

Article Title: The securitization of global slow-onset risks/threats: long COVID, a case study

Article References: Finkelstein, P. (2026). The securitization of global slow-onset risks/threats: long COVID, a case study. Globalization and Health, 22(1), Article 68. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-026-01241-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12992-026-01241-9

Keywords: Long COVID, securitization theory, global health security, Copenhagen School, riskification, chronic disability, slow-onset threats, climate change comparison, WHO, UN, health policy, security governance