The successful surgeon and author, Autul Gawande, provided a close account of the damage inflicted by dismantling by the Trump administration of the American agency for international development, but with a note of encouragement to students and teachers to remain attached to science and medicine.
Gawande, surgeon of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and member of the faculty of the Harvard Th Chan School of Public Health Health and the Faculty of Medicine, took leave of the University in 2021 after President Joe Biden appointed it to direct the USAID office for global health, a position he called “the best work of medicine that you have probably never heard”. He resigned at the end of Biden’s mandate.
“USAID cannot be restored to what it was, but it is not too late to save our health and science infrastructure and our talent.”
ATUL GAWANDE
The dismissal of almost all USAID staff and the dismissal of more than 85% of its programs caused “devastating” damage to millions of people and the United States as a world leader in health, he said.
“What I know now, three months from the moment I left my role in the USAID is that USAID cannot be restored to what it was, but it is not too late to save our health and science infrastructure and our talent,” he said in a conversation with Marcia de Castro, professor of demography Andelot at Chan School. “And it is not too late to stop destruction.”
By referring to the recent actions of the government interrupting the funding of research at Harvard, he added: “I returned to this community because it is attacked.”
According to federal programs, federal programs support health and science, including the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, and partnerships with universities and medical centers. The financing frost has struck Ariane laboratoriesA research center affiliated with Harvard and Brigham and Gawande women founded in 2012, endangering research and tests related to surgery, childbirth and primary care, he said.
Recalling its time with USAID, Gawande said that the agency, working with half of the budget of a typical Boston hospital, has built a network of 50 countries to monitor fatal diseases like Ebola and the Bird flu faster than ever, reducing emergency intervention time to global epidemics of more than two weeks within 48 hours. Programs aimed at preventing maternal and infantile deaths, which have reached 93 million women and children under the age of 5, added six years to their lifespan, he said, while supporting programs to prevent and treat HIV, tuberculosis and malaria has considerably improved the results for tens of millions of people. Before resigning, USAID was preparing to increase a set of new and inexpensive treatments to reduce severe hemorrhage after childbirth, the main cause of maternal deaths.
Most USAID countries have still had six to nine months’ medicines; It is the immediate reductions in the endowment and services that will now affect the most strongly healthy health results, said Gawande, which is this year Harvard former day lecturer.
“It’s not just a solution; it is follow-up,” he said. “A large part of the power of what I do in USAID, which I see (the World Health Organization) also do, is technical assistance that gives you 60% to 80% vaccination, then 90% vaccination.”
Gawande, who, in addition to his work in medicine, is an editor of New Yorker and the author of several books, argued that he was long -term “hope” of global health. However, he said: “As an American, one of the things I am completely uncertain is whether America will be part of the management and part of the solution so early.”
But if the United States no longer plays a leading role in global health, he said, other countries and individuals will almost certainly emerge to take the reins-as well as the leaders of Massachusetts and other states.
Whatever happens in the short term, global health work remains vital, he told students.
“You and your expertise will be necessary whatever happens,” he said.