The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.
Gawande—a surgeon, author, and distinguished professor in residence at Ariadne Labs, which he co-founded—served in the Biden administration as the assistant administrator for global health at USAID. He wrote a Nov. 5 article in the New Yorker about the devastating impact of the loss of USAID funds around the world. He was also featured in an accompanying short documentary called “Rovina’s Choice,” which he co-executive produced, that told the story of how one mother living in a Kenyan refugee camp tried to save her severely malnourished daughter after U.S. support dried up.
In the article, Gawande cited an analysis in The Lancet that estimated that USAID assistance—aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, reducing maternal and child deaths, and fighting malnutrition—had saved 92 million lives over two decades.
The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
The documentary told the story of how Rovina Naboi, a single mother of nine children, took her daughter Jane, whose health has deteriorated due to malnutrition, to a clinic and stayed with her there for 10 days. But she felt compelled to leave with Jane—still seriously ill—because she learned that her other children, left alone at home, had not eaten for days. Arriving home, Naboi managed to find food for her other children. But Jane died the next day.
The clinic’s chief medical officer, Dr. Sila Monthe, commented on Naboi’s predicament—having to choose between leaving the hospital with Jane, or staying while her other children starved. “That is a decision that no mother should ever have to make,” she said.
Read the New Yorker article: The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands
Watch a Democracy Now! interview featuring Gawande: Dr. Atul Gawande: Hundreds of Thousands Have Already Died Since Trump Closed USAID
