Halting USAID progress could bite back US

AlArabiya English

“Playing around with USAID is like playing around with fire.” Halting the progress made by USAID around HIV and other global health emergencies could bite back the US, Matthew Kavanagh, Director of the Center for Global Health Policy, tells Al Arabiya News. #USAID #Trump #ElonMusk

Transcript

00:00The other thing is that by reversing progress on something like HIV AIDS, which had been a global

00:07pandemic at one stage, actually could boomerang back and affect the United States, couldn't it?

00:12That's right. And there are right now 122 different emergency health events that are

00:19going on around the world. There's an outbreak of Marburg virus in Tanzania. There's Ebola virus

00:24that's just broken out since the president was inaugurated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

00:29And in Uganda, in Bolivia, we've got a new hemorrhagic fever. There's a wide variety of

00:34things that are going on. And we've got the continuing AIDS pandemic that's having 3000

00:40people every day infected. Interrupting these programs, deciding that the US is going to halt

00:45them doesn't just hurt millions and millions of people around the world, but it also makes the US

00:51less safe. The broad consensus around global health is that there has to be a kind of collective

00:58effort to stop the pandemics of today, to halt the pandemics of the future. All of that is work

01:03that takes money, but it actually takes a tiny bit of money for the world's richest countries.

01:08And so playing around with this is playing around with fire. The administration,

01:12the last Trump round of this, got the COVID-19 response incredibly bad, incredibly wrong.

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