glen brown

A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

"As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children"

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeler, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain.

As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.

The Administration, for its part, has denied causing widespread harm, even as it has made the scale of the damage harder to measure—halting data monitoring and dismissing the inspectors general who might have documented it.

This is common in cases of public man-made death. During Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, the Chinese government released no accurate mortality data. Observers abroad understood that a hunger crisis was under way when China began importing grain, but the scale of the catastrophe was not known until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the first reliable census allowed historians to calculate that between twenty-three and thirty million people had died.”