Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid Is Still Cut Off, Leaving Babies To Die

The most terrifying headline I ever read

Edit 2/1 looks like most of PEPFAR is back—we’ll have to see on the other stuff.

(Like my earlier PEPFAR article, I think this one is pretty important, so I’d appreciate if you could like and share it).

I’ve read some pretty scary headlines. Headlines like “A whole new thing that could end the world,” “The God delusion,” (Richard Dawkins thinks belief in God is delusional—oh no!!!!), and “A Dutch book for CDT thirders.” But probably the most terrifying headline I’ve ever come across was that of a recent Propublica article “People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True.”

The United States provides vast amounts of life-saving humanitarian aid with the puny, paltry, less than 1% of the federal budget we spend on foreign aid. Or at least, we did. Shortly after being elected, Trump signed an executive order that would shut off all foreign aid pending review, with the exception of military aid to Egypt and Israel. This would have left huge numbers of people to die who are dependent on U.S. aid.

A few days later, however, Rubio had the decency, at least ostensibly, to roll back the ban on lifesaving humanitarian aid. This was supposed to cover programs like PEPFAR, which have saved millions of lives. It also was supposed to cover cases like the heartwrenching one described at the beginning of a pro-publica article:

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

While Rubio did sign a waiver ostensibly maintaining lifesaving aid, many of the most important kinds of aid are in limbo, with the funds still cut off and orders barring people from returning to work. Brett Murphy, a Pulitzer prize winner, and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, continue in their pro-publica article:

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.

Many groups doing such lifesaving work either don’t know the right way to request an exemption to the order, known as a waiver, or have no sense of where their request stands. They’ve received little information from the U.S. government, where, in recent days, humanitarian officials have been summarily ousted or prohibited from communicating with the aid organizations.

…

Aid groups that specialize in saving lives were relieved and thought their stop-work orders would be reversed just as swiftly as they had arrived.

But that hasn’t happened. Instead, more stop-work orders have been issued. As of Thursday, contractors worldwide were still grounded under the original orders and unable to secure waivers. Top Trump appointees arrested further funding and banned new projects for at least three months.

Most terrifyingly, in my view, this delay is still affecting PEPFAR, the anti-HIV program that has saved around 25 million lives. While early reports released shortly after my article seemed to suggest that PEPFAR was back, it’s still not back—still not able to continue its previous actions:

If the exemption waivers don’t come through, policy analysts and HIV advocates say the full 90-day suspension of those programs would have disastrous consequences. More than 222,000 people pick up HIV treatment every day through the program, according to an analysis by amFAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. As of Friday morning, those orders had not been lifted, according to three people with direct knowledge.

Up through last week, PEPFAR was providing HIV treatment to an estimated 680,000 pregnant women, the majority of whom are in Africa. A 90-day stoppage could lead to an estimated 136,000 babies acquiring HIV, according to the amfAR analysis. Since HIV testing services are also suspended, many of those could go undiagnosed.

The disarray has also reached warzones and foreign governments, risking disease outbreaks and straining international relationships forged over decades.

Some people are not very concerned about this shutdown of life-saving aid. Cristine Rice, for instance, explains that she is “out out of fucks to give about Sudanese babies.” I think this is utterly ghoulish! I am out of fucks to give about anything Cristine Rice ever says.

Even if you think that America has a far greater obligation to Americans than to foreigners, you ought to still think we have some obligation to foreigners. If we could spend five dollars saving the lives of 25-million people in Africa, that would clearly be the morally required thing to do. A sick Sudanese baby wasting away and starving to death is a horrendous thing, and if you find yourself indifferent to it, I’d recommend a long hard look in the mirror—if you even show up in it.

Imagine trying to explain such a position to those mothers and brothers and fathers. “Yes, I support ending the tiny percent of the federal budget spent feeding your child, as you languish in a warzone, because I’m very concerned about the tiny bit of American paychecks that it costs.” My ancestors several generations back were foreigners—Polish and Romanian Jews. They immigrated to America just a few decades before the Nazis took over and killed all the Jews in Poland and Romania.

PEPFAR has saved twice as many lives as people were killed in the holocaust for a minuscule fraction of the budget—well below 1%. If you don’t think we should spend on PEPFAR, do you think that it would have been worth spending a few billion dollars to stop the Nazi holocaust?

Second, at the very least we have an obligation not to kill foreigners. The Iraq war was immoral, and it would have been immoral even if it ended up being slightly good for America, because it killed lots of Iraqis. You shouldn’t kill people. But abruptly cutting off life-saving aid is more akin to killing than to failing to save people’s lives. As Kelsey Piper explains:

If Congress were to decide to end PEPFAR, there'd be time for people who rely on it for antivirals to find other sources. With the overnight freeze, they don't have that chance. Morally I consider this pretty much murder.

Imagine if the government was providing cancer surgery to some desperately poor people in warzones, many of them young children. Then, one day, with no warning or legal precedent, it cut off the cancer treatment, leaving them to die in weeks. Imagine additionally that the cancer treatment was cheap and effective, costing just a few thousand dollars. That would be grotesquely evil; this is worse.

Lastly, foreign aid is in the interests of the United States. If entire countries are left completely ravaged by war, famine, and disease, that triggers massive refugee crisis that negatively affect us. Even if you think that a person’s moral worth drops to zero the minute they cross the Canadian or Mexican border, you should still think foreign aid is in our interest.

I don’t have a particularly grand takeaway. Contact your representatives. If you know someone who has influence in the Trump administration, try to make it clear to them the kind of humanitarian catastrophe being unleashed. Lifesaving aid still isn’t back, and as a result, lots of innocent people will die horrible deaths. The Trump administration needs to stop leaving babies to die.

Once again, I cannot clearly convey just how horrible this is—a poem from a grieving parent who lost a child will have to do for conveying a tiny sliver of the gravitas. If you find yourself thinking that this sort of tragedy is not something that we should take any effort to prevent, I think you have become reprehensibly divorced from basic moral sense.

Your little hands so soft and still, I held them in my own,
Whilst wishing we had more than just a handprint coming home.

I studied every nail and line and every inch of you,
And cried for all the things your little hands would never do.

I’d never get to clean your hands, there’d be no messy play,
l’d never see your fingers point to things you’d try to say.
I’d never hear the sound they’d make whilst splashing in the bath,
Or how they’d cover up your lips whilst trying not to laugh.

I wish so much I could have taught you how to write your name,
Or watched your little hands outstretched to play a catching game.

Your little hands would never feel a scrape or gain a scar,
Nor would they play an instrument or learn to drive a car.

Your little hands, my little hands, forever left unchanging,
No exploring, falling, climbing, drawing and no ageing,
My only wish for you and I is that we had more time,
’Cause I could have spent forever with your little hands in mine.