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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-shutdown-of-usaid-has-already-killed-hundreds-of-thousands>
"It was January, my final week in the outgoing Administration. In a few days,
Donald Trump would be inaugurated as President. I had come to the United States
Agency for International Development in early 2022, leaving my surgery practice
and public-health research in Boston to lead the agency’s global-health
efforts. Now I’d be returning to my previous life.
I spent my last days at U.S.A.I.D. in meetings with our civil- and
foreign-service leaders, thanking them. Their work with partner countries had
helped to contain twenty-one outbreaks of deadly disease, sustain Ukraine’s
health system after Russia’s invasion, combat H.I.V., tuberculosis, and polio,
and reduce maternal and child deaths worldwide. On a budget of just twenty-four
dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per
person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An
independent, peer-reviewed analysis in
The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D.
assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.
Many of the leaders voiced trepidation about what the incoming Administration
might bring, but I struck a sanguine note. U.S.A.I.D., I pointed out, had more
than sixty years of solid bipartisan backing. Trump had advanced significant
parts of the agency’s work in his first term. He had personally pledged to end
H.I.V. as a public-health threat by 2030. The incoming Secretary of State,
Marco Rubio, had been a vocal supporter of the bureau. There would be isolated
partisan skirmishes—over diversity initiatives, abortion-related policies, and
the like—but more than ninety-five per cent of our bureau’s work had never been
under contention.
Clearly, I lacked imagination. Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump
signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. Secretary
Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be
paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves
could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on
them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die
in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it
escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in
defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated
more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the
agency. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court did anything to stop it.
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made
death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of
mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University
epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of
current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the
State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November
5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths
of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children."
Via Lisa Stranger and Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
