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'A Global Health Massacre,' and It's All On Us [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-11
“I’m hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: ‘a global health massacre,’ in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV’s. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I’ve long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.” – Tweet from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (2/27/25)
***
This week political coward/phony Christian hypocrite/Secretary of State Marco Rubio, dutifully following the orders of his masters, announced that 83 percent of foreign aid contracts under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will be cancelled.
About 5,200 out of a total of approximately 6,200 contracts will be nixed because that’s what co-president Elon Musk -- who’s seeking to destroy the agency that had previously announced it was looking into him and the Starlink system he’s provided to Ukraine in its war with Russia -- wants.
The remaining contracts will be administered by the State Department, which absorbed USAID last month. Rest assured that Rubio will continue to do exactly as he’s told.
The massive cuts were made despite a ProPublica report on March 3 that said: “For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.”
Of course, all of his is fine and dandy with our four-time indicted, twice-impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, insurrection inspirer, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, Russian puppet, President Donald Trump, who’ll continue to add to his track record of killing people in service to what he sees as his own best interests (see the Covid pandemic).
Welcome to America. This is who we are.
But at what cost? As NPR reported, these cuts “are reverberating throughout the aid community and raising concerns about the consequences.”
Sadly, we’ve become a country that just doesn’t care.
In a statement on the Musk-owned X website, Rubio said the cancelled contracts “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve (and in some cases even harmed) the core national interests of the United States.”
That’s bullshit. Nobody believes that all but 17 percent of the contracts fell into that category. Just like no one believes that the USAID’s announcement last year that it was examining its relationship with Starlink – a satellite internet system owned by Musk – had nothing to do with the his efforts to dismantle the agency.
As ProPublica reported: “The administration says it is rooting out waste and fraud, while Musk has publicly vowed to destroy USAID altogether.”
Five thousand Starlink terminals were provided to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russia’s invasion. But many Russian operatives claimed to have access to Starlink despite Musk’s assurances that only Ukraine was using the service, Newsweek reported.
Then, in September, Ukrainian forces downed a Russian drone that had a Starlink terminal integrated with its systems, raising questions as to how secure Starlink’s operations during the Ukraine war are, Newsweek said.
I think I see motive and opportunity here.
So, what’s the human cost in all this?
NPR reported that Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was subsequently removed from his job, outlined in a series of memos his projections for the damage the discontinuing of U.S. aid could cause.
Enrich said that the halt on lifesaving programs that provide vaccinations, health care, and food for the hungry “will lead to increased death and disability, accelerated global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks – directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health.”
His estimates included:
*1 million starving children won’t have access to food and nutrition
*Up to 17.9 million more people will get malaria and as many a 166,000 people will die from it -- a 39 percent increase over current rates.
*Tuberculosis cases, including multidrug-resistant TB, will soar by about 30 percent.
*As many as 28,000 people will suffer from emerging infectious diseases, like Ebola and Marburg.
*Hundreds of millions of people will be sickened by polio infections over the next decade, with an additional 200,000 people paralyzed by the disease.
“None of us have ever seen anything like this,” Jeanette Bailey, director of nutrition research and innovation at the International Rescue Committee, told NPR about the cuts.
ProPublica’s report on Enrich’s memos said: “The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.”
You can read the NPR story here.
You can read the ProPublica story here.
A New York Times story from March 6 detailed how the cuts are affecting the fight against the latest Ebola outbreak.
The Times reported: “The Ebola outbreak in Uganda has worsened significantly, and the country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, American officials said this week.”
The Ugandan government lacks “sufficient laboratory supplies, equipment, and protective gear for medical workers and people tracing contacts. The termination of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development was impeding the ability to procure supplies,” the Times said.
“With no USAID money and CDC (the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) expertise, it was like Uganda was left to die,” claimed Dr. Herbert Luswata, president of the Uganda Medical Association.
You can read the Times story here.
Here’s a previous blog post on the issue.
***
This is all sickening, disheartening, and terrifying, and all the result of a criminal president and the corrupt GOP that supports his every whim.
Rubio made a point to thank Musk’s group of incels – the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) -- for implementing “overdue and historic reform.” Yeah, historically cruel and destructive. Then again, most of the people who will suffer aren’t white and aren’t Americans, so they really don’t care.
Come on, Marco. Will you come out of the fetal position at least once in a while?
The thing to remember is all this spending was approved by Congress, and the law doesn’t allow the president to cancel these expenditures on his own. So, what’s happening here is illegal based on our Constitution.
How can this be happening? It’s because Republicans in Congress, trembling in fear of Trump, have stepped back and allowed him to do this. There’s been a number of court cases filed and some injunctions issued, but we have no reason to believe Trump will, in the long run, do what the courts tell him to do.
So, people will die, people will suffer, people will get sick – including Americans. Meanwhile Musk will keep cutting, the GOP will keep cowering, all while the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts earmarked mainly for the rich and the accompanying cuts to programs that help the poor remain a strong possibility for our future.
Like I said, welcome to America. This is who we are.
Unless we do something about it.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Please share and subscribe for free via email on its home page.
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