Dr. Atul Gawande

speaker

179 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Dr. Atul Gawande’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The New Yorker Radio Hour · How an Estimated Seven Hundred Thousand People Have Died from DOGE’s U.S.A.I.D. Cuts · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

We've been compiling a tracker.

I say we.

I have put together a team of a group of reporters and journalists that have been compiling all of these reports.

And already they have documented not only the systems have gone down, but 1,200 different individually identified people who have directly died from the shutdown of foreign aid.

When JFK argued for USAID, he was arguing that assistance abroad, first and foremost, was also assistance to the United States itself.

One is the direct benefit to the United States of eradicating polio in the world, eradicating outbreaks.

We were the driver of eradicating smallpox, interestingly, with Russia as the instigator of the idea.

This was rooted in the Marshall Plan, the idea that we would, instead of pillaging the world around us as they were defeated in war or weakened, we would invest

invest in their liberty, invest in their economic capacity, invest in their survival.

And the result was trade partners of the United States received assistance from the United States along the way, whether it was Germany or South Korea or then India or then places like Mexico and Latin America.

And now we see Africa starting to become middle income along the way.

Total foreign aid from the United States was in the $60 billion range, got cut more than 60%.

And then what was left has been sort of turned into, give me your critical minerals or I won't give you HIV drugs.

This goes hand in hand with an approach that says we don't cooperate in the world, we try to dominate.

USAID couldn't be more opposite in its approach to the world.

First of all, he's reached beyond HHS by stepping in to block foreign assistance with the White House backing for vaccines around the world.

But within the HHS, CDC is...

hollowed out as an organization capable of acting abroad or at home in public health.

More than a quarter of their staffing has been removed.

Their laboratories have been shuttered, significant parts of them.

Showing 41–60 of 179 · page 3 of 9