I see Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a good man doing bad things, but perhaps he thinks even worse of me: He recently suggested that I was a liar.
While testifying before Congress, Rubio claimed that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development had not cost any lives.
“No children are dying on my watch,” he asserted. At another point in the hearing, he broadened his statement to include adults as well: “No one has died because of U.S.A.I.D.”
This is ludicrous: The only debate is whether to measure the dead in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, challenged Rubio, citing reporting overseas by me and by Reuters of individuals who died as a result of the shutdown of American humanitarian aid.
“That’s a lie,” Rubio said. “False.”
So let me help Rubio with the truth. Meet Evan Anzoo, a 5-year-old boy who was born with H.I.V. in South Sudan:
I mentioned Evan in a column in March from South Sudan. This was a child as precious as yours or mine. Evan’s life was in our hands, and for five years America kept him alive with antiretroviral medicines costing less than 12 cents a day, through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. This was a program started by President George W. Bush that has saved more than 26 million lives so far, and it turned the tide of AIDS around the world and built enormous good will toward the United States.
