Comment by mullingitover

17 hours ago

The Lancet[1] forecasted Musk's 'bit of a jerk' elimination of USAID[1] will cause a death toll that puts him around 10x that of Pol Pot.

> Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

6 comments

mullingitover

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refurb  11 hours ago

Lancet lost all credibility long ago. They had to retract several seminal papers on autism and vaccines as well as Covid.

USAID isn’t an aid organization, it’s a front for CIA efforts internationally. It funded CORDS during the Vietnam War which was a paramilitary force.

DOGE didn’t get rid of USAID, Rubio did day one (since it falls under the State Department).

  • mullingitover  4 hours ago

    > Lancet lost all credibility long ago.

    Whether or not they're credible to you, they're still the #2 ranked general medicine journal in the world, second only to the NEJM.

    > USAID isn’t an aid organization, it’s a front for CIA efforts internationally

    This is a conspiracy theory that can be trivially refuted by simply following the money. You can do this because their budget is public, unlike the budget of the CIA. The stuff you're citing from a half century ago isn't relevant to the work they've been doing when Musk said "Time for it to die."

    What USAID actually was was a vital tool of US soft power and influence globally, and if you believe that it's important to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of the United States' perception as 'the good guys' then by all means it was very important to stop their work immediately.

wisty  15 hours ago

You mean Trump's elimination of USAID? You really think he's worse than Hitler?

  • mullingitover  15 hours ago

    Let’s not pretend that Trump knew or cared what USAID was. Musk was extremely hands-on with the dismantling of that agency specifically.

    I didn’t share my thoughts, I shared a Lancet article calculating the death toll. I leave the math, the comparisons, and the moral judgments as an exercise for the reader.