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Enlightened self-interest and funding USAID [1]
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Date: 2025-03-04
My late husband used to teach at a major American university--and among the upper-level classes he taught, one was on migration as message. He closed every semester with a lecture on why migration was in the self-interest of the USA--using facts, history and numbers. He called it enlightened self-interest but would often deal with a few students who didn't see why we should let anyone into our country and that enlightenment had nothing to do with it. And then he'd segue into "well, how about just self-interest then?"
This is my reasoning here as well--enlightened self-interest (and then just plain, old self-interest) not specifically to do with migration, but for why we should help fund myriad health-related projects around the world. Sure, soft diplomacy is the bedrock on which USAID was built and we could discuss this; but I'd rather have us look into funding USAID for a totally different reason. However, lest I bury the lead, yes, enlightened self-interest has dictated much of our policy here and abroad and I'd argue that it stems from our own history of wanting to be free of pressure, influence and religious intolerance and a culture that has little by little evolved in that direction, while inadvertently bending the arc of our history towards justice.
However, if this doesn't mesh with your values, political or cultural beliefs, then how about this? Just plain old, hard-headed self-interest. No Christian values. No Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist values.
By not funding USAID we are giving nature what nature would desire if it were a thinking entity--by nature I mean for our purposes here, viruses and bacteria. Viruses have this nasty ability to mutate. As do bacteria. They mutate happily and silently until the various mutations reach critical mass and can then wreak havoc on innocent human populations. (Often, to be sure, they start off mutating and affecting the various non-human populations around the world first, with currently the biggie Avian Flu; and then they jump ship to human beings. This is a function of zoonotic transmission, which briefly defined is the movement of any pathogen from a non-human vertebrate to a human one.)
To fill in the blanks, here you go. Tuberculosis worldwide remains a huge threat to humankind, with as many as one million or more people dying each year from it, but with the numbers on the decline year-by-year. However, as threatening as it is, it is no longer for the most part a fatal illness for the 10 million or more worldwide who contract it yearly. Why? How about the most advanced treatments now developed and then disseminated to those with TB? But by USAID no longer working alongside WHO and other worldwide organizations to help contain TB with the best medicines, the huge risk is that TB without adequate drugs to curb it will mutate. And to forms of the bacteria that are highly drug-resistant. Okay, so what does this have to do with the USA? Welp, people travel. From all over the world to the USA. But Americans also travel, all over the world. And bacteria, in this case, the one(s) that cause TB also catch a ride and land here in the USA. So then, drug-resistant forms of TB make it here and then what?
And before the claim is made that our genius American medical research is topflight and new drugs they'll develop can keep up with the mutations--um, now, not so much. Because? Premier American research facilities, organizations and entities are being shut out or flat-out shut down. By the Trump administration.
FDA cancels pivotal advisory meeting about next season's flu vaccine - ABC News This means internally we won't have the protection against mutating flu strains for our most vulnerable citizens.) (An aside, but a valuable one--the meeting of the committee that figures out which flu strains will be prevalent this coming fall, and which findings are used to formulate the flu vaccine that will best protect us, has been canceled. Here's the story on this:
Okay, back to global mutation possibilities: how about AIDS? As USAID is now withholding all AIDS medications and treatments world-wide for which they were responsible, the consensus among those in the medical world is that AIDS, which is a highly opportunistic virus, will most certainly mutate. Sure, the million or more now not being given their medications will likely die, but not before the virus mutates into something very drug-resistant, very nasty, and with possibly a faster transmission speed. So there's that. And for anyone who was alive during the early years of the AIDS epidemic here in the USA, this ought to send shivers up your spine—folks died; but blood supply was also affected and hence transfusions were often a form of medical necessary Russian roulette.
Lest this becomes far too lengthy to read, let's just throw in some garden variety illnesses that occur both here and worldwide without adequate vaccinations and I'll let you fill in the blanks: measles; pertussis (whooping cough); polio; and mumps. And piling on, how about malaria? Um, won't get here? Nope, you'd be wrong--it is already showing up in some Southern states--including Texas and Florida.
And then the worst of the worst? Ebola. And Marburg. Both hemorrhagic diseases. Like the plague. Thus, by not treating these currently (and there are a few outbreaks right now), these too will arrive unwanted to our shores. Again, the question: then what?
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