Researchers Tell Models To Say People Will Die Without Your Money

Here is how the political magazine Nature opened its article “25 million deaths: what could happen if the US ends global health funding: Models estimate the ginormous potential impact of foreign-aid cuts.” (The vulgar use of ‘ginormous’ is a signal not to take the article too seriously.)

The United States spent roughly US$12 billion on global health in 2024. Without that yearly spending, roughly 25 million people could die in the next 15 years, according to models that have estimated the impact of such cuts on programmes for tuberculosis, HIV, family planning and maternal and child health.

The central fallacy is not that models have been used to make this ‘ginormous’ claim, though that is certainly a weakness as we’ll see. It is the tacit premise that it is my, since I am an American, my duty to give my money to the whole world for their health, and not give it to my family and neighbors instead.

The arrogance and irrational entitlement of its foreign editors—for the magazine originates in a foreign land—ought to amaze you, though likely it doesn’t, because their tacit premise is shared in this land by the majority of both those calling themselves liberal and conservative. The idea that Americans ought to both dictate to and take care of the world was, and still is, assumed by both foreigner and native alike. American givers take giveawars for granted, and recipients become both demanding and resentful.

Yet it is not my duty to buy aspirins for the world. Though it is to awaken you to bad science. So let’s look at their model.

The paper is “The Effects of Reductions in United States Foreign Assistance on Global Health” by John Stove and a slew of others, including a guy named Pickles (really). Their methods:

We applied established mathematical models to the most affected countries in each domain to estimate the health impacts over the period 2025 to 2040. We used 6 models of HIV, three different approaches to estimate family planning impact and one model each for TB [tuberculosis] and MCH [maternal and child health], applying them to as many as 80 countries. We compared model projections assuming constant funding (Status Quo) with projections assuming a complete elimination of US funding in each country. Some models also considered partial cuts or restoration of funding over time.

If I have taught you anything, and which I insist you have memorized, is that all models only say what they are told to say. That means the only thing of interest here is to see what they told their models to say, since it will be impossible to verify their predictions if the cuts to USAID remain.

Before that, I leave it as homework to note the use of a popular marketing phrase in the Abstract of this The Science paper. This is at least consonant with the ‘ginormous’ in the news piece.

Beginning by noting their happiness with “the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals for 2030”, the authors told their models to say this:

A complete cessation of US funding without replacement by other sources of funding would lead to dramatic increases in deaths from 2025-2040: 15.2 (9.3-20.8) million additional AIDS deaths, 2.2 (1.5-1.9) million additional TB deaths, 7.9 million additional child deaths from other causes, 40-55 million additional unplanned pregnancies and 12-16 million unsafe abortions.

Working backwards, we see they have told their model to say as my money increases, abortions increase. And they told their model to say that if my money is removed, the abortions remain but become “unsafe”. Which is always true for the lives inside would-be mothers who are slayed. Of course they have forgotten that even if it were true that as my money increases so do abortions, that if my money is removed abortions, “safe” or “unsafe”, might well decline.

You will have noticed the scientism, given they assume it is moral to allow women to kill the lives inside them put their by their men without consulting with or getting the consent of those men. I assume it is not moral. But I don’t pretend my assumption is scientific.

TB model:

We used a dynamic, compartmental model of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) transmission, progression, and care to simulate TB epidemic trajectories. The model structure is shown in Supplemental Figure 1…

Thus, we assumed a reduction in treatment initiation rates proportional to budget reductions. We assume that funding cuts are sustained from 2025 into the future and estimate cumulative excess incident episodes of symptomatic TB and TB-associated deaths through 2040.

Highlights of their HIV models:

Estimates of the impact on AIDS deaths and other HIV indicators are for the 55 countries previously supported by the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Six different well-established HIV models were used, and the results were averaged at the country level before aggregating to a global total. All models were calibrated to surveillance, survey and program data on HIV prevalence and AIDS mortality available for each country. …

We used data on PEPFAR expenditures for HIV as a proportion of total expenditures from country resource alignment reports22 and UNAIDS National HIV Spending Assessments. We assumed that the coverage of HIV testing, treatment and prevention services would drop from 2024 levels to a lower level in 2025-2040…

Model upon model upon model. Uncertainty galore. Nothing better than a student’s exercise in learning how to punch buttons on the computer. Useless as science.

They don’t miss an appeal to pity. In their Discussion: “Children would be especially hard hit with 8 million additional deaths and over 8 million additional orphans by 2040.”

There is no awareness among the authors, no, not even a scintilla of a whisper of a hint, that this modeling mania could be wrong. Especially in its childish premise that nothing in these countries would change should my money cease flowing. The savage, uncomprehending natives are modeled to wander about in a daze, staring into their now-empty wallets and dying from lack of my money. They would not, the models insist, think of changing their behavior.

There’s also no estimate of what fraction, surely large, of these USAID dollars that goes into the hands of activists, politicians, and other lowlife. And thus they have no model of the good that will arise from cutting off the blood supply of these leaches.

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