Plagues and Peoples in the 21st Century

Covid, China and the US intelligence Community

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.

Citizens of Wuhan lining up outside a drugstore during the initial phase of the Covid pandemic in January 2020 (China News Service, CC3.0).

The historian William H. McNeill is probably best-known for his 1963 book, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, which he later described ‘as an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States.’¹ As a US military attaché in Greece from 1944 to 1946, McNeill was present at one of the earliest scenes of Cold War confrontation, and his experiences there informed later US research on insurgent warfare.²

For current intelligence debates however, his most relevant work may be the 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, an early study of the impact of disease on history. I first read it in the early months of 2020 and it convinced me that if Covid-19 was unprecedented in the life experience of most of us around at the time, historical perspective gave it a deeply familiar pattern.

Some of these regularities were cultural. For example, Boris Johnson’s initial reluctance to follow Italy into lockdown echoed the British statesmen of the early 19th century who ‘saw quarantine regulations as an irrational infringement of the principle of free trade, and bent every effort toward the eradication of such traces of tyranny and Roman Catholic folly.’³

Others concerned the nature of disease itself. In McNeill’s account, the major urban centres of Eurasian civilisation, Europe, the Middle East, India and China, were also reservoirs of infection, which periodically spread to the rest of the world as epidemics. The modern era brought a transition from an epidemic to an endemic regime, with fewer occasions for exposure of large populations to entirely novel infections. He nevertheless saw three ways in which new diseases could emerge.

Changes in the flu virus and mutations of other infectious organisms […] remain a serious possibility. In 1957, for example, a new “Asian” strain of flu appeared in Hong Kong; but before it attained epidemic force in the United States, vaccine against the new variant had been produced in sufficient quantity to affect the incidence and intensity of the infection.⁴

Ecological shifts provide a second vulnerability.

Even without mutation, it is always possible that some hitherto obscure parasitic organism may escape its accustomed ecological niche and expose the dense populations that have become so conspicuous a feature of the earth to some fresh and perchance devastating mortality.⁵

Most scientific accounts of the origin of the Covid-19 involve these two factors, suggesting that virus originated with bats or other animals and crossed over to humans via the Huanan wildlife market in Wuhan, China. Yet much attention continues to focus on McNeill’s last and most speculative suggestion.

A third unpleasant possibility is that biological research aimed at discovering effective ways of paralyzing enemy populations by disseminating lethal disease organisms among them might succeed in unleashing epidemiological disaster on part—or perhaps on all of the world.⁶

Elements of the US intelligence community have considered the possibility of an artificial origin for Covid-19 for some time. In June 2023, an ODNI report revealed that the FBI and the Department of Energy backed the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory leak rather than a natural source. At that point the CIA declined to take a position on the grounds that ‘both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.’⁷

However, one of the last acts of outgoing CIA director William Burns was to order a new review, at the request of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, in which analysts were asked to come off the fence. They came down on the lab leak side, albeit with low confidence and without any new information.

Releasing the study was one of the first acts of Burn’s successor, John Ratcliffe, a staunch China hawk and long-standing advocate of the lab leak hypothesis, a fact which has only deepened suspicions of the agency’s verdict.⁸

One pandemic expert, Professor Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University, retorted that ‘the only factual change is a new president. That's politics, not science.’⁹

While defenders of the new CIA analysis point to its bipartisan origins, growing distrust of China is also a bipartisan trend. Such political factors have often influenced US intelligence judgements. From the Team B exercise of the 1970s to the Iraqi WMD affair of the 2000s, there is a long history of competitive intelligence analyses devolving into bureaucratic power struggles.

In the case of Covid-19, the political tide is increasingly running against the scientific consensus. In the wake of the ODNI report, Mehdi Hasan noted that two major peer-reviewed studies had traced Covid’s origins to wildlife markets while ‘there’s been nothing equivalent to those findings in the published literature on the lab leak theory side of the debate.’¹⁰

Since then a major study in the journal Cell has concluded that ‘the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of SARS-CoV-2 sampled within the Huanan market is genetically identical to the MRCA inferred from the pandemic as a whole. This finding is consistent with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 within the Huanan market.’¹¹

In the words of Australian virologist Edward Holmes ‘Consider the odds that a virus that leaked from a lab was first detected at the very place where you would expect it to emerge if it in fact had a natural animal origin – vanishingly low. And these odds drop further as we need to link both the A and B lineages to the market.’¹²

In many ways the parameters of this debate are narrower than they appear. At the time of the ODNI report most US intelligence agencies concluded that Covid was not genetically engineered, even if it emerged from a lab, and all agreed that it was not a biological weapon.¹³ It’s not clear that the new CIA review changes that.

Conversely, a natural origin does not absolve the Chinese Government of responsibility for its failings in the earliest days of the pandemic, such as its censorship of whistle-blower Dr Li Wenliang.¹⁴

The lab leak theory has nevertheless provided a pretext for incendiary rhetoric of the kind espoused by the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Tom Cotton, who has stated that ‘the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.’

In Plagues and Peoples, McNeill argued that ‘one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.’ The debate over Covid origins has become as much about the latter as the former.¹⁵

1. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years, Journal of World History, Vol. I, no. I, pp.1-2, archived at the Internet Archive.

2. William H. McNeill, 'The View from Greece', in Thomas T. Hammond (ed.), Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War, University of Washington Press, 1982, p98. Archived at the Internet Archive.

Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary and Resistance Warfare, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, D.C., November 1963, p.vi. Archived at CIA.

3. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Anchor Books, 1976 (1998 edition), p.371.

4. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, pp.399-400.

5. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p.400.

6. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p.400.

7. Potential Links Between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Origin of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, June 2023.

8. Julian E. Barnes, C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins, New York Times, 25 January 2025.

9. Lawrence Gostin, X Post, 25 January 2025.

10. Mehdi Hasan, Those insisting the pandemic was human-made are ignoring the known facts, MSNBC, 28 June 2023.

11. Crits-Christoph, Alexander et al., 'Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic', Cell, Volume 187, Issue 19, 5468-5482.e11.

12. Edward C. Holmes, The COVID lab leak theory is dead. Here’s how we know the virus came from a Wuhan market, The Conversation, 14 August 2022.

13. Potential Links Between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Origin of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, June 2023.

14. Li Wenliang: Coronavirus kills Chinese whistleblower doctor, BBC News, 7 February 2020.

15. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p.30.