Comment by ricardobeat
17 hours ago
You'll have to disagree with a lot of scholars, in addition to this HN comment, to make your point. This is the '90 million' study:
> This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths) [1]
30B+ is pocket change for the US, but makes a massive impact in poorer countries.
It also had a soft power effect that the current US government seems completely oblivious to [2].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23353912
[3] https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
No, that is the very study that is completely absurd on it’s face. Watch the video again.
I'll watch the video in full when you read the paper. It starts with obviously flawed math: mortality rate decreases + 'lives saved' doesn't have to add up, and a flat death rate does not equal "no change" because of aging and other factors. It then jumps into mischaracterizations of the study, completely ignoring the data, "it's just a lot of numbers to make it look sophisticated" and false allegations like that excluding high income countries (which do not receive USAID) is manipulating the results. The author clearly has no idea what the scientific method is just randomly finding "holes" in the paper.
The 90M figure is probably exaggerated, but this video is completely nuts. This is exactly why the internet has failed us.