“The freezing of American financing has affected the key abilities to respond to outbreaks,” says the spokesman for the World Health Organization, Alexander Nyka. The absence of the USAID epidemic outbreak response team is felt with special intensity; WHO describes its services as a “change of play.” According to WHO, the United States previously contributed between 20% and 40% of financing for sudden outbreaks of infectious diseases.
“The Ebola outbreak of Uganda occurred on the same day of freezing foreign aid. Despite this, the exemption to help in front of the outbreak was quickly restored,” the state department announced to Wired in a statement. “This is a process. If mistakes are made, they will be indicated and corrected as necessary, while we strive to do our best for the American people.”
Other USAID programs that save lives and those that apparently have been granted humanitarian exemptions have encountered similar problems. Earlier this month, Wired reported that the FEWS FOOD HELP AND PREVENTION PROGRAM FEWS NET remains inactive, despite having received an exemption, and that many of the workers who had launched the program have been fired. This is still true today. “We have not yet been able to resume any activity,” says Payal Chandiramani, spokesman for Chemonics, the international company that executes much of the program.
And AIDS prevention programs?
Meanwhile, programs against AIDS and HIV that save lives have not resumed. The president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief is one of the most popular successes of Usaid, which is attributed to having saved more than 26 million lives since former President George W. Bush found DC, to draw attention to the impact of losing these programs. Despite receiving an exemption, Pepfar has not been able to resume its work, along with other paralyzed AIDS programs, with financing and personnel cuts that hinder the program. “The exemptions have not worked,” says Emory Babcock, a former USAID contractor who worked in Pepfar and was fired at the beginning of Doge’s cuts.
On the same day of Musk’s comments, the Trump administration ended more than 10,000 Global Health subsidies of USAID and the State Department, ending with a variety of services to which an exemption had been granted to save lives.
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, a non -profit organization that often receives USAID funds and works with Pepfar, received on Wednesday the notification that three of her project agreements with USAID had been rescinded, despite having previously received approval to resume activities under the exemption of Pepfar. The programs serve more than 350,000 patients in Lesoto, Eswatini and Tanzania, including 10,000 children. “There is nothing left,” says Russell. “Collateral damage are lots of corpses.”
Although a federal judge ordered the Trump Administration to defrost the foreign aid funds to temporarily comply with the pending invoices and payments owed to contractors around the world, the Supreme Court suspended the order on Wednesday night, which means that help groups (including those who work in the prevention of infectious diseases in Africa) continue to charge for the services provided, which in some cases prevents any other work To save lives.
Meanwhile, a new deadly hemorrhagic fever has appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last five weeks, with more than 60 dead and a growing number of patients. Although it causes a violent and fast waterfall of symptoms, including blood vomiting, it is not about Ebola or Marburg, but seems to be an unknown disease. A USAID worker who spoke on anonymity says to Wired: “We have no one on the ground to control this.”
Article originally published in Wired. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.
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