Jeremy Youde writes:

In its chaotic first few weeks, one of the new Trump administration’s many targets has been global health. With a few strokes of a Sharpie, President Donald Trump halted nearly all U.S. foreign assistance programs, including those for global health, and started the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization. Trump made a range of false claims about foreign aid to support his moves, including spreading the lie that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent $50 million to Gaza for condoms that Hamas “used as a method of making bombs.”

These actions, many of which defy Congress and are abuses of executive branch authority, have caused havoc for aid groups and other governments and undermined relationships built up over years of American foreign policy. While some foreign assistance programs have received waivers on an ad hoc basis to resume at least some of their work, the overwhelming confusion and uncertainty have thrown the global health community into tumult, dismantling decades of American leadership on global health and threatening remarkable progress in fighting infectious diseases around the world.

For decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations, the active involvement of the U.S. in funding and staffing global health programs has made the world healthier. The President’s Malaria Initiative, launched under George W. Bush’s administration in 2005, has saved at least 50,000 lives each year from the mosquito-borne disease. Guinea worm, a debilitating parasitic infection found in infected drinking water, has gone from afflicting more than 3.6 million people annually in 1986, including in parts of the Middle East, to being almost entirely eradicated thanks to a partnership between the Carter Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has also been a leader in the Global Polio Eradication Campaign, preventing more than 20 million cases of paralysis and bringing the number of wild polio cases down from 350,000 in 1988 to 12 in 2023—yes, 12. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has channeled more than $120 billion since its launch in 2003 under President Bush toward stopping the spread of HIV and increasing access to life-prolonging medicines. It is credited with saving more than 26 million lives in the past 21 years, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. PEPFAR has also enjoyed strong bipartisan support over four different presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. [Continue reading…]