ON JANUARY 28th the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued an “emergency humanitarian waiver” to exempt life-saving aid from Donald Trump’s freeze on all foreign assistance. Two weeks later, in Malawi, a country of 20m in southern Africa that is the world’s seventh-poorest by GDP per person, most local charities have stopped working and about 5,000 people—many of them health workers—have lost their jobs, says Mazisayko Matemba of the Health and Rights Education Programme, an NGO. “We expect more people to get infections and start dying.”