As President Trump bids Elon Musk a fond farewell amid hopes his DOGE work to cut waste and fraud in government endures, leftists have cooked up a new "narrative" about him, now that their vandalism campaign on Tesla has lost its novelty.
They're out claiming that Musk has, sniff, sniff, killed 300,000 children.
According to a column by New York Times lefty columnist Michelle Goldberg:
There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
Eighty percent is a good number, given that Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that 88% of USAID went to people other than the intended recipients who were apparently just there as window dressing for NGOs living the high life and funneling cash back to Democrats. Eighty percent aid cuts left 12% for the indigent and 8% for the NGOs to play around with. Rubio adamantly said that nobody died as a result of the cuts, and as the stats indicate, the latter were still making bank.
But they're a greedy bunch so what better than to get all of it back by smearing Musk as a child killer? They hate him because of his effectiveness in exposing Democrat funding games, and even more, because of his association with President Trump.
So who is Nichols, making this accusation? A lefty associate professor probably still angling for the full professorship and willing to say what the establishment wants to get it.
Her Boston University bio reads:
Brooke Nichols, PhD, MSc, is an infectious disease mathematical modeller and health economist specializing in transmission dynamics, implementation modeling, and optimal resource allocation for pathogens including HIV, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV-2, and other pathogens of pandemic potential. Her work seeks to minimize the health and economic impact of infectious diseases through innovative quantitative approaches.
It was undoubtedly written in the post-pandemic era when lockdowns had done their damage and now are thoroughly discredited. Did she sign the Great Barrington Declaration condemning the impact of lockdowns? Not that I can tell.
But she is on record as defending the U.S. lockdowns as less bad than other countries' lockdowns, which is an odd take for someone supposedly seeking to "minimize" the economic impact of infectious diseases. If she couldn't see the damage COVID lockdowns brought -- with study, after study, after study, she doesn't know much about her field.
For her, it's anything to defend the 'establishment.'
She created an AIDS-patient database of USAID recipients in places like Africa who supposedly died without the aid, called the PEPFAR Impact Counter, here, counting dead bodies like beans. Her grand total? About 60,000, not 300,000. She notes that it's an "estimate," not an actual body count.
She then references another site with estimates, Impact Counter, presumably the work of her estimates and other professors and their estimates, and there we get the full 300K.
Marco Rubio has pointed out that the methodology is loaded with holes.
But even if it weren't, the real question is ... why aren't these countries taking care of their own people? A wealthy country like Nigeria with a GNP per capita of about $6,000 can surely take care of their poor with diseases like AIDS -- and they tried, through clinics that charged small fees to indigents of about $160 a year or $15 a month, mainly because having them totally free tended to lead to a lot of one-time customers skipping their continuing medical treatments but were undercut by USAID's free programs. If you had AIDS and were poor, wouldn't you take the free program? And if you could take the meds once and skip treatment afterward, why would you pay? No wonder Nigeria had trouble reaching its poor with AIDS treatment, USAID was cutting them off at the knees. That in turn led to weepy stories like this from NPR.
There are other problems with this blame-Elon-for-300,000 deaths narrative. Is every case as simple as a missed clinic visit, or would those patients, who often have multiple medical and social problems, have died anyway?
Musk was advising for the shutting down of bad and inefficient programs for one purpose: So that taxpayers would get value for what was left. Waste and fraud in Social Security leaves less money to pay recipients -- get rid of the waste and fraud, and Social Security paychecks might be worth something to those who paid in. Same deal with foreign aid: USAID was little more than a slush fund for Democrats, who funneled money out, and in turn, saw it roll back into their campaign coffers from NGO donations in various forms and workarounds.
Very little of it ever went to the poor. Cut out the waste and fraud and the U.S. might be in a better position to deliver foreign aid to those who need it.
But that's not what this is about, is it? It's about pinning the 'killer' label onto Elon and Trump because they've run out of arguments.
It's important to call these actions what they are: evil. One estimate says Elon Musk's cuts to USAID "have already resulted in 300,000 deaths." The world's richest man has made the poor suffer even more. https://t.co/m8gQm7hvbl
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 31, 2025
Actually, he's made the thieving rich of the NGO world -- the world of the 88% cut of aid dollars -- suffer even more.
For most of us, that's the idea.