THERE is a myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when threatened. The United States is like the mythical ostrich in its response to the current Ebola outbreak. The hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship was like a dress rehearsal. It showed the consequences of dismantling global pandemic preparedness. That rehearsal is over. The far more dangerous Ebola act has begun, and the curtain has risen in Central Africa.

ON MAY 1, 2026, the United States Department of Defence finalised classified artificial intelligence contracts with eight corporations: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Oracle, SpaceX, and the startup Reflection AI. These agreements will deploy large language models on classified military networks. The one major AI laboratory that was excluded, Anthropic, was dropped because the Trump administration blacklisted it for insisting on safety guardrails.

The species of Andes hantavirus that has been in the news is not likely to affect us in India immediately. So far, that species has existed only in South America and on one cruise ship. Right now, large-scale outbreaks are probably not coming for us. The real threat is not hantavirus.  The real threat is the deliberate, systematic dismantling of global and national pandemic preparedness by anti-science regimes in the US and India. The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius is not an incoming plague – it's a dress rehearsal, a trial.

ALEX KARP, the chief executive of Palantir, published a 22-point manifesto on April 19 declaring that "hard power in this century will be built on software" and that certain cultures are "regressive and harmful." Five days later, the Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek released its long-awaited V4 model: 1.6 trillion parameters, open source under the MIT licence, matching the most expensive proprietary American models at roughly one-thirtieth the price.

Two events.

ON April 7, the US president opened his social media app and typed this about Iran and its 90 million people: "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." A genocide threat, in plain English. Could that happen without human language? No. The language conveys an inhuman threat. Language is not the true problem in this situation. The language arises from the arrogance of power and the greed for oil. These dress up mass death in a casual social media post. Iran's own language was mature, subtle, and alive.