Disabling Dynamics: Long Covid and the Challenges of Securitizing Slow-Onset Health Threats

This paper investigates why the United States fully securitized acute Covid-19 but not Long Covid, despite the latter's potentially greater long-term socioeconomic burden. Drawing on securitization theory, riskification, and scholarship on slow-onset and delayed-onset threats, it develops a four-part theoretical framework to explain structural variation in security responses: (1) actor framing and audience uptake; (2) the spatiotemporal visibility of harm; (3) a systemic 'body count bias' that privileges mortality over morbidity; and (4) domestic and international disincentives that suppress sustained attention to chronic, ambiguous crises. Using a most-similar systems design, the study compares U.S. governmental discourse, policy actions, and media framings of acute Covid-19-marked by temporal compression, spectacular mortality, and rapid elite mobilization-with the diffuse, bottom-up emergence of Long Covid, characterized by invisible, dispersed, and medically uncertain disability. The analysis shows that Long Covid's slow-creeping trajectory, lack of spectacle, and association with stigmatized or marginalized populations prevent it from being framed as an existential threat to a clearly identifiable referent object, relegating it instead to technocratic risk management. The study concludes that the U.S. security apparatus is structurally ill-equipped to recognize and respond to slow-onset, disabling threats, leaving the country vulnerable not only to Long Covid's long-term societal effects but to future mass-disabling events-natural or engineered-that erode state capacity gradually rather than through acute, lethal shock.