Some readers are fed up with me!

“Don’t guilt trip me” is a refrain I heard from many readers of my recent columns from West Africa and South Sudan about children dying because of cuts in American humanitarian aid.

Let me try to address the kinds of concerns critics have raised in Times comments and on social media:

These may be tragedies, but they are not our tragedies. They are not our problems. I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, but we are not the world’s doctor, and we can’t end all suffering.

True. We cannot save every dying child, or every mom hemorrhaging in childbirth. But our inability to save all lives does not imply that we should save none.

A starving child on the brink of death can be brought back with a specialty peanut paste, Plumpy’Nut, costing just $1 a day. And the anemia that often causes women to hemorrhage and die in childbirth can be prevented with prenatal minerals and vitamins costing $2.13 for an entire pregnancy.

Don’t those seem reasonable investments?

It’s widely acknowledged that there were problems in American humanitarian aid. Why should American taxpayers, already strained and facing rising debt, have to foot the bill for dysfunction?

I’ve followed the United States Agency for International Development for decades, and by far the worst dysfunction has been the chaos following U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling this year.