A new blog from the Center for Global Development estimates for lives saved by US assistance worldwide to range between 2.3 to 5.6 million with the preferred number resting on gross estimates of 3.3 million. The estimates are primarily for deaths prevented from HIV/AIDS, vaccine-preventable illnesses covered by Gavi, TB, malaria, and emergency/humanitarian relief.
These net estimates may suggest the likely long-term impact were the US to abandon lifesaving support, but gross impacts are more likely to capture the more immediate effects. US health assistance is concentrated on poorer countries in Africa least able to ramp up spending. And while other donors remain more generous than the US in terms of the percentage of their economy that goes to foreign aid, most are flatlining or reducing budgets. Add to that the fact the US remains biggest donor in absolute terms, it is implausible that domestic or other foreign resources could even partially fill the gap left by US funding in the short term.
The multilateral agencies that the US supports including Gavi and the Global Fund continue to operate. But most bilateral assistance and food aid through the World Food Programme (WFP) appears to have been at least considerably disrupted. Give or take, the estimates for each core intervention suggest that on an average day when US foreign assistance is working as it normally does, it saves a little more than 9,000 lives, of which a little more than 6,000 are through bilateral programs or involving in-kind support from the US.
An updated blog on estimates at the country level can be found here.
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