Mothers and Children Are Already Dying Because of Elon Musk’s Cuts

People are already dying due to cuts from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As the New York Times reports, care workers in African nations — which, lest we forget, the president called "shithole countries" during his first turn in the Oval Office — relied upon United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to keep their charges alive.

Musk insisted earlier in March that "no one has died" from DOGE's freeze on USAID grants — but the death of 10-year-old South Sudanese boy Peter Donde and others like him demonstrates otherwise.

Thanks to medications disbursed through the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a George W. Bush initiative, children like Donde were able to survive and even thrive despite their parents dying from the deadly virus.

After Musk and Trump cruelly and possibly illegally froze USAID, however, those children were on their own — and are now suffering tragic and preventable deaths.

In late February, the newspaper notes, Donde died of a pneumonia infection that he got after his immune system took a hit without the medications keeping his viral load low from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Moses Okeny Labani, an outreach worker who helped the 10-year-old and nearly 150 others stay alive, told the NYT the boy "would not have died" if USAID was still supplying funds for his medicine.

Prior to speaking to the newspaper, Labani had never heard of Musk. Once NYT writer Nicholas Kristof gave him a quick rundown of the billionaire's bona fides — and his claim that "no one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding" — the care worker insisted the South African-born magnate was "wrong."

Donde, unfortunately, isn't the only exception to Musk's erroneous assertion that nobody has died from the cuts.

The NYT learned of others in South Sudan alone — including 8-year-old Achol Deng, five-year-old Evan Anzoo, and his mother, 35-year-old Jennifer Inyaa — who have all gotten sick and died in recent weeks after losing access to USAID-managed care.

Margret Amjuma, a healthcare employee who confirmed Deng and Donde's deaths, had a dire warning that has been repeatedly echoed in other publications: "Many more children will die in the coming weeks."

Perhaps most heartbreaking, however, is the pre-epitaph from Angelina Doki, a volunteer whose charges have already started to die following USAID shutting off supply chains for life-saving antiretrovirals.

HIV positive herself, Doki told the newspaper that her own supply of antiretrovirals had run out and suggested that she, too, will die soon.

"I am going to develop the virus," the healthcare volunteer said. "My viral load will go high. I will develop [tuberculosis]. I will have pneumonia."

"We are," Doki concluded, "going to die."

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