“President Donald Trump’s administration plans to end U.S. funding for Gavi, an organization that helps buy vaccines for children in poor countries, and will scale back efforts to combat malaria, among thousands of cuts revealed in a document prepared by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The administration will continue to fund some grants that pay for drugs that treat HIV and tuberculosis and provide food aid to nations where civil wars and natural disasters are occurring, according to the document, which was first reported by the New York Times.
The document, reviewed by Reuters on Wednesday, lists international aid programs that will be dismantled as well as those that will be retained.”
“If the CDC is anything, it is supposed to be the chief agency that detects, controls, and eliminates infectious diseases. HIV is just such a communicable microbe. The CDC estimates 31,800 Americans were infected with it in 2022, the year in which the latest data are available. The CDC also estimates that “approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. About 13 percent of them don’t know it and need testing.”
Oddly, efforts to cut back on the CDC’s programs aimed at reducing HIV infections stand in contradiction to President Donald Trump’s own Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative that he announced during his 2019 State of the Union address. Trump’s original EHE goal was to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030. The EHE initiative boosted preventative strategies including increased HIV testing and the promotion of effective new pre-exposure prophylaxis medications. Thanks in part to the EHE, the rate of HIV infections is down 19 percent since 2016.
The Trump administration’s ultimate plans with respect to the CDC’s HIV prevention division are not yet public, but some reporting suggests that at least some of its programs may be shifted to the Health Resources and Services Administration. As KFF, a health care policy nonprofit, observes, the agency’s primary focus has historically been the delivery of medical care, not implementing preventive strategies.”
“President Trump will reinstate a policy cutting off U.S. global health funding to international organizations that provide legal abortion information, referrals or services”
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“The gag rule has negatively affected global health care systems beyond family planning, according to a 2019 review of existing research on the policy.”
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“Only a handful of studies actually examined the rule’s impact on abortion rates, and those three papers concluded that the policy does not decrease abortion rates, per the scope review.”
“A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.”
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“The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.”
“The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.”
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“The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizations, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior U.S. defense official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated.”
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organizations.”
Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organization said that the U.N. appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the (land border) crossings work more effectively.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-bidens-gaza-pier-project-unraveled-2024-07-25/
“FEMA does have a program — Serious Needs Assistance — that gives recipients $750 each if they qualify, but it’s one of many aid offerings that disaster victims can receive.
The barrier to qualify is low, most people affected by the storm are likely eligible, and recipients are not limited to this $750 in support.
Serious Needs Assistance is supposed to provide rapid relief to people who need cash to cover immediate needs like water, food, and first aid. That relief is intended to temporarily help while people wait to hear about approval for other aid programs that could provide more robust funds for larger issues like home repairs.”
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked at a press conference in Italy last week about whether China was selling Russia arms for use in the war. Biden, who was standing beside him, waited for Zelensky to say President Xi Jinping told him he would not do so, before delivering a parting shot and ending the event. “By the way, China is not supplying weapons but the ability to produce those weapons and the technology available to do it. So, it is, in fact, helping Russia.”
The comment appeared to signal a hardening tone toward Beijing following months of US warnings that it shouldn’t help its friends in Moscow over the war. NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg reinforced the tough new line during a visit to Washington Monday that included Oval Office talks with Biden.
“Publicly, President Xi has tried to create the impression that he’s taking a back seat in this conflict to avoid sanctions and keep trade flowing. But the reality is that China’s fueling the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II,” Stoltenberg said at The Wilson Center. “At the same time, it wants to maintain good relations with the West. Well, Beijing cannot have it both ways. At some point, and unless China changes course, allies need to impose a cost.””