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It is difficult to calculate all the good that ATUL Gawande did in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard University, he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. Contributing to New Yorker Since 1998, it was widely published on public health issues. His 2007 article in the magazine and the book from which he appeared, “Review list statement: How to correct things correctly“The sources of clarity and truth in the discussion about the costs of health care were. In 2014, it was published.”To be fatal: medicine and what matters in the end“Live, poetic and emotional novel that provides unforgettable descriptions of the ways in which the body progresses and the end of our life options.
Guande’s work on public health was influential in Clinton and Obama departments, and begins in November 2020, he worked in President Joe Biden Corona virus disease19 Consultative Council. In July 2021, Biden was nominated as an official of the World Health Office at the United States Agency for International Development, where he worked to reduce diseases abroad. The ninety -year -old resigned from this position on the day of the return of Donald Trump to the presidency.
When we talked recently New Yorker RadioGuande was usually hot, and high -soul, in a serious mood. There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. After all, it was watching Trump and Eileon Musk, with joy, a global health agency that was recently for the source of sincerity and inspiration. As a surgeon, Gwandi has long been in a position that allowed him to save one life simultaneously. Recently, in short, it was part of a vast group group responsible for good around the world. Now, as he explained, this collective has been deliberately thrown into chaos, and even the rubble. Certainly the cost in human life will be enormous. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Your President Biden as a global health assistant at the United States Agency for International Development is a job that you described as the greatest function in medicine. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, she immediately began targeting the United States Agency for International Development with an executive order that stopped all foreign aid. Did you know, or have you arranged, that Trump will act the way he has?
I had no idea. In the previous Trump administration, it embraced what they called themselves “natural rules”. They had a head of the American Agency for International Development, which was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkles, which I did not disagree with. They called it “The Journey to Self-Dependence”, and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, to enable the strongest economies, and we have not done enough. I have already continued a lot of work that happened during that time.
Tell me a little about what I was responsible for and what is the good in the world.
I had twenty -five thousand people, between the capital and sixty -five countries worldwide, and worked to advance health and protect Americans from diseases and spread the disease abroad. The goal was to work with countries to build their systems in order to protect global health security and improve global results – from reducing HIV/AIDS And other infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, to enhance primary health care systems, so that these countries are transmitted from relying on aid from donors. Within three years, we have documented the provision of more than 1.2 million people yet Corona virus disease Lonely.
Let’s stop it. Your part of the American International Development Agency was clearly responsible, to provide 1.2 million people – of what?
So, Corona virus disease The first global reduction in the average life expected in seventy years was, and it has disrupted the ability all over the world to provide basic health services, which includes HIV/AIDS [medications]But it also included childhood immunization, diarrhea and pneumonia. Part of my goal was to reduce the death rate in any specific country that occurs before the age of fifty. The teams will focus on the best three to five killers. In some places, this will be HIV. In some places that would be a safe birth of tuberculosis, it was a large part of the work. And fortification: Forty percent of the gains in survival for children under the age of five in the past fifty years in the world came from vaccines alone. So vaccines were a large part of the work as well.
What is the issue against this type of work? It seems to be absolute.
One of the cases that can be more efficient, right? Americans imagine that huge money amounts go to this work. Opinion polls show that they believe that a quarter of our spending goes to external aid. In fact, on a budget for our global health works less than half of the hospital budget, where I performed surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of millions of people, with programs that saved lives in millions. For this reason I describe her as the best function in medicine that people have never heard. It is at a level level that I can never imagine. So the case against it – I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this is a criminal institution, that this was money laundering, and that this was corruption.
Where will he get this idea? Where do these myths come from?
Well, what is difficult to analyze is: What is just deliberate ignorance? Not only ignorance – he is lying, right? For example, there is a census that they pay only ten percent of the US Agency for International Development, have already obtained beneficiaries in the world. Now, this is a deliberate distortion of statistics, which says only ten percent of the United States Agency for International Development went to local organizations instead of multinational organizations and others. There are legitimate criticisms that this percentage can be higher, and that more local organizations should get money. I did a lot of work that raised these numbers largely, I reached thirty percent, but this was not the discussion they were dragging. They claim that money does not actually reach people and that corruption picks it up, when the ability to reach huge numbers of people – in fact, was the best purchase of health and human assistance for a long time.
Now the comprehensive agency, as I understood it, had about ten thousand people working for it. How much does it work in the US International Development Agency now?
In fact, the number was about thirteen thousand. The comprehensive number is now-it is difficult to appreciate because people are running and stopping like the lighting key-
It has been turned on and turns off, which means that their computers are closed?
Yes, it is finished and then endless – like, “pardon, sorry, let the Ebola team go.” I heard Elon Musk saying something in this sense in the Oval Office. “But we returned them, don’t worry.” It is a moving goal, but this is what I say: More than eighty percent of contracts have been completed, which represents the work of the American Agency for International Development and organizations that are not aimed at the profit that works with it, such as Catholic relief services and the like. More than eighty percent of employees have been placed on administrative leave, termination, or refusal in one way or another.