MEDintel Solutions offers insightful consultative services to provide policy makers with medical and public health analysis to make informed decisions to protect health and security. With the advent of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, the value of medical intelligence has been increasingly recognized as paramount to protecting national security as well as protecting private sector interests and personnel abroad. 

 

In January 2000, the National Intelligence Council issued its National Intelligence Estimate titled “The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States”. This prescient landmark report warned that “diseases will endanger U.S. citizens at home and abroad, threaten U.S. armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions in which the United States has significant interests”. 

 

Today the linkage between medicine/public health and national/corporate security is more pressing due to increased global travel and trade, acceleration of climate change, emerging pathogens and drug resistant microbes. In addition, the proliferation of non-state actors and hostile authoritarian regimes willing to use biologic agents as weapons of war and terror, as well as the advances in synthetic biology threaten national security and business entities overseas.  

 

While the public health community traditionally focuses on protecting the health of the population often against naturally occurring threats, the current security framework tends to focus on intentional threats to the nation and military by both state and non-state actors. To be more effective in the future, a more collaborative and cohesive strategy is needed.

 

In addition to utilizing years of medical and public health training, education and practice to analyze the policy implications of the health and medical status of world leaders, MEDintel Solutions offers public health and epidemiologic expertise to elucidate the policy implications of foreign medical and public health information made available through both covert and open-source intelligence. 

 

As an example, in December of 2022 China abruptly abandoned its “zero Covid” policy. This unleashed the rampant spread of the virus in a population with minimal natural immunity and questionable vaccine immunity. Coupled with the lack of transparent and credible health information from the central government, U.S. national security policy makers as well as private sector corporate entities are operating in the dark. To comprehend the global economic and political impact of this most recent outbreak, medical intelligence is necessary to predict the ramifications of clinical and public health information on the ground in China.  

 

• What effect will the Sinovac vaccine have on curtailing the outbreak? 

• How will the country’s existing healthcare infrastructure and personnel stand up to a barrage of critically ill patients with severe respiratory illnesses? 

• What secondary signs of high morbidity and mortality can be used to estimate the extent and severity of the outbreak?

• What is the likelihood of novel variants arising from unmitigated propagation of the virus?

•  What mitigation effect will the Chinese produced antiviral VV116 have on the epidemic?

 

The sophisticated analysis necessary to answer these questions requires in-depth clinical and epidemiological knowledge as well as years of experience in the healthcare system to facilitate interpretation of available data.   Where medical science and public health skills are required to facilitate security strategy and decision making, MEDintel offers Solutions.