“Doctors would often tell patients, ‘It’s your imagination. It’s something else. There’s no such thing as Lyme disease,’” rasped Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr at a New Hampshire press conference on Friday. On its face, this was a strange pronouncement: who are these doctors denying the existence of an illness first identified in the Eighties? But in the fraught world of tick-borne diseases, Kennedy’s words signalled a fundamental change in the government’s position.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection transmitted when a tick, having acquired the bacteria through earlier feeding on a carrier animal, latches onto a human. The bacteria then pass into the bloodstream, and a few days later symptoms appear. While the presentation of illness may be varied, the standard of care is not. The view of mainstream infectious disease doctors and official bodies such as the CDC is that a course of oral antibiotics will eliminate the bacteria.

Proponents of the chronic Lyme theory disagree that this is the universal way to end the disease. They argue that the bacteria can find their way deep into tissue, where they can lurk for months or years before causing a renewed infection, and that treating them often requires extreme measures. Most often, this means long courses of powerful antibiotics, but it can also include bespoke supplements and off-label medications.

It is the official distinction between Lyme and chronic Lyme that has collapsed. The former is generally still accepted by the medical establishment, while the latter is not. For Kennedy, chronic Lyme is real and legitimate, and so to contest it is to deny the disease itself.

At the press conference on Friday, he made it clear that chronic Lyme would no longer be relegated to the medical fringe. Kennedy pledged a new raft of measures aimed at combatting the prevalence of the disease in American society. He had with him on stage two people he identified as Lyme disease activists. In addition to more accurate tests for the disease and tick reduction programmes, he announced a collaboration between the HHS and the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), an organisation dedicated to increasing public awareness of chronic Lyme and guiding physicians in its treatment. The heart of this guidance is that a holistic assessment should be used to diagnose the disease, and that clinician judgement is generally preferable to a uniform treatment protocol.

This reorientation from the programmatic and the bureaucratic to an approach with a patient-by-patient plan highlights the appeal of Kennedy and the broader MAHA movement. Whether one believes the cause of symptoms is a lingering infection, lasting damage caused by an infection that has been eliminated, or something else entirely, people who still suffer from the disease after conventional treatment have long felt failed by an establishment that has little to offer. In theory, a more MAHA medical system would focus on patient testimony, which could enable their doctors to find solutions.

But it’s far easier to rage against an uncaring bureaucracy than to reform it. Kennedy’s plan calls for better tests, the repurposing of existing medicines, and the development of new treatments. Yet improved tests could fail to detect active infection in people claiming to suffer from chronic Lyme disease. This extra research could also end up like intravenous antibiotics which, when compared to a placebo, show no particular efficacy for treating symptoms and come with serious complications. There is also the chance that this extra research points to a variety of physical and psychological conditions, distinct from the actual disease and related to the coverage surrounding it.

All treatments come with financial costs, and many come with some amount of physical risk. A medical system has to balance these against the potential benefit to the patient. For their part, medical authorities have to delineate which treatments have a solid evidentiary base and which do not, and sometimes that means placing certain approaches out of bounds entirely. Kennedy has demonstrated his willingness to erase the old lines. But to do his job, he must now draw new ones.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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