Dear Friends,                                                                                         Please keep count:

How many have died, adults and children, since the suspension of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, inaugurated by President George W. Bush, and one of the most successful aid programs of all time? It is estimated to have saved the lives of 36 million people. It turns AIDS from a death sentence to a controllable condition by providing those who could not possibly afford them on their own with the necessary medications. It permits HIV-AIDS positive pregnant women to deliver babies who are not HIV-AIDS positive. Most infants without such medication die within a year.       

PEPFAR was suspended along with all USAID programs by the Trump Administration, so, by Trump. Yes, technically, it was the so-called government agency known as DOGE, an entity that is so clownishly incompetent that it actually makes the rest of the Trump administration look … well, what? Well at least like more competent clowns. But this is no joke. People are dying. I am concentrating on PEPFAR, but the same thing is happening across USAID.

Since the Trump Administration, top to bottom, is utterly and entirely untrustworthy, never ever believe anything they say. But that means that it is very hard to figure out what is happening. I have been trying to figure out what is happening with PEPFAR. It was suspended, then some administrators said it would be resumed, in the meantime USAID in its entirety has been eliminated. I think that the most reasonable conclusion is that PEPFAR is gone. If that is so:

The most recent figures that I have seen are that, whatever happens next, already 26,000 adults and 3,000 children have died because PEPFAR was suspended. Even if it is revived, they are gone, every one of them, forever. HIV-AIDS medication must be continuous, people die even if you suspend it for a short while. I’m not going to get into the criminal actions of the so-called DOGE and its moronic boss. Forget all that for now, and just think of the ones, the individuals, the human beings, adults and children, in Africa for the most part, who, as I write this and as you read it, right now, die. Put yourselves in their place, in the place of their loved ones.

Love and solidarity,                                                                                                                                     Bobby