Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Healt on the effects of the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID):

In the article, Gawande cited an analysis in The Lancet that estimated that USAID assistance—aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, reducing maternal and child deaths, and fighting malnutrition—had saved 92 million lives over two decades.

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.