Trump's Legacy Will Be the Countless People Killed by His Policies

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-100-days-public-health-deaths/

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https://archive.li/fJpA4

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second administration ended this week. Many, including me, have written about the devastation these few months have caused to important programs across the federal government, and the ways that science and public health have been undermined in both word and deed.

These attacks have not gone unanswered. There has been a flurry of lawsuits to stop the cuts at NIH, NSF, CDC, and other agencies. Universities are standing up to the administration, and thousands are organizing to defend America’s health and the health of people around the globe. But the wreckage is still vast.

As the scope of the damage the president has done becomes clear, scientists are also starting to document and estimate the toll of death and suffering that will now be a part of Trump’s legacy. Several new papers have underscored what is at stake.

In a paper in one of The Lancet family of journals, Jan Hontelez, from Erasmus University Medical College in Rotterdam, and colleagues from around the world estimated the short-term effects of a 90-day interruption in funding for the US’s flagship global HIV/AIDS program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar). Three months might not seem like a long time, but it’s enough to cause tremendous harm. The excess deaths the study predicts under various scenarios in 7 sub-Saharan African countries range from 64-70,000 over the next five years. Given that most PEPFAR sites are now in limbo, we will soon be able to put these predictions to the test.

Longer-term estimates of the effects of the cessation of PEPFAR funding are even more grim. Debra ten Brink at the Burnet Institute in Australia and colleagues in the Lancet HIV suggest that anticipated international aid reductions, including the cessation of PEPFAR funding, may lead to 4.4 million to 10.8 million additional new HIV infections by 2030 and between 770,000 to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths in children and adults by 2030.

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