Spoiler alert: It (probably) won’t be Ebola.

But there are some big lessons to learn from the newest outbreak of one of the world’s scariest viruses now ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The Situation 

On May 15, the DRC’s Ministry of Public Health confirmed eight samples of Bundibugyo virus, one of four viruses known to cause Ebola in humans.

As of this writing, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports 831 suspected cases and 186 deaths across the DRC and Uganda. By comparison, the 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak—the largest on record—killed over 10,000 people and took more than 100 days to reach 1,000 cumulative confirmed cases; the current outbreak will surpass that by the time you read this.

Even more concerning is that cases are not confined to a single area in the DRC or Uganda but are spread across multiple clusters, particularly throughout the DRC.

No, the world isn’t ending. But Ebola, a viral hemorrhagic fever with roughly a 50% fatality rate, is no joke. Bundibugyo virus, first identified in 2007, had previously caused only two small outbreaks and wasn’t considered a likely candidate for one this large—which is why no approved vaccines or treatments exist, and why early tests (designed for more common Ebola strains) missed it.

Now, Bundibugyo virus is unlikely to cause a global pandemic. It’s too lethal, and viruses that spread widely need to keep their hosts alive long enough to transmit. That’s why COVID was such an effective pandemic-causer: It spread easily and asymptomatically but killed sparingly (relatively, of course). Also, Bundibugyo is not an airborne virus. The viruses that cause Ebola are zoonotic diseases; they originally jumped from animals to humans. “Bats are assumed to be the main reservoir hosts of the virus,” notes Dr. Hassan Abdi Hussein, “and the initial incidence of human epidemics invariably follows exposure to infected forest animals through contact or consumption of bush meat and body fluids of forest animals harboring the disease. Human-to-human transmission occurs when contaminated body fluids, utensils, and equipment come in contact with broken or abraded skin and mucous membranes.”

That said, it’s not impossible. Viruses mutate, and Bundibugyo will now have more human hosts than ever before in which to do so. (To be clear: Most studies suggest this is extremely unlikely, but for a disease this scary, this analyst would prefer impossible to extremely unlikely.) Even so, based on what we know today, this outbreak will lead to a serious and deadly regional epidemic, not a global pandemic. Which is to say it should be taken seriously rather than hysterically.

It Will Happen Again

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of this century’s most geopolitically consequential episodes. It accelerated the shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, disrupted global supply chains for years, drove fiscal and monetary policies that helped fuel the 2022 inflation surge in developed economies, and pushed biotech to the front line of geopolitical competition.

And there will be another pandemic at some point. It could be in two years or 100 years, but it will happen. I should point out that COVID was an entirely predictable phenomenon. Scientists had been warning for decades that globalization and the attendant movement of people, animals, and food increased the likelihood of “zoonoses” (diseases that jump from animals to humans). One such study even correctly predicted where a disease like COVID-19 might emerge more than a decade prior.

Climate change, urbanization, and economic development are bringing human populations into closer quarters with animals and regions that were more isolated before, and that means more potential for pathogens to jump from animals to humans. This isn’t just a developing world problem either.

The prevention of pandemics depends on early identification and institutional trust. Last February, Elon Musk “accidentally” cut US Ebola aid and prevention during his time at DOGE. Musk claimed this mistake was immediately noticed and rectified, but in January 2025, USAID terminated the $100M STOP Spillover program that ran zoonotic surveillance on the DRC-Uganda border. Meanwhile, US humanitarian aid to DRC fell ~80%, and the International Resue Committee pulled back from five Ituri health zones to two, leaving the outbreak epicenter unmonitored.

This isn’t exclusively an American issue, though. It isn’t America’s job to be the world’s policemen any more than its pandemic prevention system. The WHO’s reputation was greatly diminished by its COVID response: An independent review panel found the WHO was late to declare an emergency, refused to tell countries to assume human-to-human transmission even when the precautionary principle demanded it, and ran its alert system on a deliberative IHR cadence while a respiratory virus moved much faster. None of that is fixable with new leadership or a better budget cycle because the mismatch between what the WHO is built to do and what a fast-moving pandemic requires is structural. The next time a novel pathogen emerges, the same institution will make the same mistakes.

Miracles Made Routine

The average American’s trust in his or her government is at all-time lows according to the most recent Pew data. When a new potential pandemic emerges, will national governments trust the WHO? Will there be systems in place to ensure early identification, contact tracing, and disease containment? Will citizens trust the advice of their governments when something worse than COVID comes around? The Bundibugyo outbreak is showing the answer to this question is clearly, “No.”

Because despite everything typed above, it is also true that the human species knows more about identifying, treating, and preventing illnesses than ever before. The WHO predicts it could be six to nine months before a Bundibugyo vaccine is available. That is incredible. 

We live in a time when scientists can generate an effective vaccine against one of the most terrifying diseases we have encountered in less than a year. Stop for a moment and think about how amazing that is: how privileged we are to live in an age of unprecedented understanding about stopping the spread of disease. What if Europe could have stopped the Black Death in nine months? What if smallpox’s spread in North America could have been stopped in a six- to nine-month window?

After COVID was identified as a new virus, Moderna designed the primary sequence for its COVID-19 vaccine in just two days in January 2020. It received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA 11 months later. These are the sorts of things that would have been seen as miracles even 50 years ago, and today they are commonplace, banal, and politicized.

Map/Chart of the Week

Blind Spot

On May 21, Ankara’s 36th regional appeals court annulled the November 2023 CHP congress, removing chairman Özgür Özel and the entire leadership and reinstalling Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as interim chair—the man Özel had beaten in that congress, and who had lost to Erdoğan in every major national election he ever contested.

The CHP called it an attempted coup. Borsa Istanbul fell 6% and tripped the market-wide circuit breaker. Özel and his leadership barricaded themselves in party HQ in Ankara for three days. On Sunday afternoon, riot police broke through the parking gate, pepper-sprayed the building, and threw them out. Özel tore up the court notification on his way out, marched a crowd toward parliament, and announced that parliament was now the center of the political struggle. Erdoğan’s AKP insists, with a straight face, that it had nothing to do with any of this.

What is interesting here is not that the court ruled the way it did. (Turkish courts have been ruling against the CHP for years; it would have been more surprising if they didn’t). What is interesting is the choice. Erdoğan, or whoever is making these calls, did not jail Özel. Jailing Özel would have made him a martyr alongside Imamoğlu, who has been in prison for over a year on charges he and his lawyers describe as politically motivated. Instead, the court restored the leader the CHP itself had rejected—the leader whose decade-long failure was the very reason Özel was elected in the first place. The net effect is to return the CHP to its pre-2023 condition: institutionally alive, electorally dead. The 2024 local sweep, which was the AKP’s worst result since it took power in 2002, was carried by Özel-Imamoğlu coherence, which is now broken. The opposition thought it had finally figured it out.

This will be the biggest test thus far to Mehmet Şimşek’s two-year orthodoxy program—rates higher, fiscal discipline tighter, the lira off the floor—meant to put Turkey back on the menu for foreign portfolio investors after a decade of being uninvestable. It was working. The 6% drop on Friday was the market saying that some of the premium it had begun to extend was conditional on a rule-of-law story. Erdoğan’s bet is presumably that capital will be back as soon as the headlines fade, because where else is it going to go: Turkey is 86 million people with a median age around 34, sitting on top of the Bosporus, with the only land bridge between Europe and the Middle East that doesn’t require crossing Russia. That bet is probably correct. But I’d note that the part of the Şimşek story that depended on Turkish institutions looking like something other than Erdoğan-by-other-means just got more expensive to sell.

None of this changes the long Turkey thesis. Turkey is one of the best-positioned countries in the world for the next 25 years. The opposition will fragment, reform, and fragment again. The courts will rule whichever way preserves the political balance the executive prefers. Erdoğan or his successor will keep winning presidential elections—until they don’t, because the demographic coalition that built the AKP is aging out, and the kids in İzmir and Istanbul are not their grandfathers.

The thing to watch for is not whether Turkey is “still” a democracy. It’s whether major political questions remain contested in public. Last week’s events are ugly. They are also evidence that the contest is real.

Reader Question

Finally…

What I’m watching: PONIES (Peacock)

What I’m reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

What I’m listening to: The Vance Crowe Podcast: Shay Foulk: Theology, Military, and the Vibe Coding Death of Ag Apps