Musk’s Chain Saw Is Killing Thousands

By Shlomo Maital

         Dr. Atul Gawande was assistant administrator of the US Agency for International Development until January. He’s a surgeon and  a professor of health policy,

          He was interviewed by David Remnick, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, on March 14.   What he said speaks for itself. 

           “On a budget for our global health work that is half the budget of the hospital where I did surgery in here in Boston ==  We reached hundreds of millions of people with programs that saved lives by the millions. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine experiencing.  I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was democratic money laundering, that this was corruption.

          “…over 80% of the contracts have been terminated representing the work that is done by USAID and the, the for-profit and not for not-for-profit organizations. They work with like Catholic Relief Services and things like that. And more than 80% of the staff have been put on administrative leave, terminated or dismissed one way or the other.

        “The internal estimates are that over 160,000 will die from malaria per year from the abandonment of these programs if they’re not restored, that we’re talking about 20 million people depending on HIV medicines.  … you know, you’re talking hundreds of thousands in year one at a minimum, just on the reduction in immunizations, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.

        “[When Russia attacked Ukraine]  Russia shut down the medical supply chain, and so a hundred percent of the pharmacies just closed;  250,000 HIV patients can’t get their meds. A million heart patients can’t get their meds.  …they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put the hospitals under cyber attack  …this US AID team, in four weeks, we’re able to move the entire hospital records system to the cloud, allowing protection against cyber attacks, got oxygen systems back online, and were able to get 50% of the pharmacies open in about a month, and it ultimately got 80% of the pharmacies open.

       Remnick:  Why wasn’t this widely known and praised?

          “…in that job, I had to speak for the US government. I couldn’t write for you [The New Yorker] during that time.”  (Public officials are simply not allowed).  

          Remnick:  “Is the damage irreversible?”

           “I had a discussion with a Minister of Health just today and, and he said, I’ve never been treated so much like a second class human being.” 

          Who will ever again trust the United States of America?  

           p.s. I live in Israel, a country hugely dependent on the US for weapons, support, and backing.  The US is busy cutting its own deal to free its Hamas hostages with dual US citizenship.   We in Israel, and the whole world, we are all in deep hot water.