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Keeping Up With the Korruption in Kazakhstan

Explore episode Jul 1, 2026
News
Nicholas Kristof Names the Children Elon Musk Says Never Existed

Keeping Up With the Korruption in Kazakhstan · Jul 1, 2026 News

Elon Musk demanded that critics name a single person who died because of DOGE's USAID cuts. Nicholas Kristof names them: Peter Dande, Evan Anzu, HIV-positive children who died after health workers were fired. Yama Freeman, who bled to death because DOGE cut ambulance diesel. Jabea, a 4th-grade girl ranked third in her class who died of malaria after cuts eliminated bed nets, health workers, medicine, and fuel in a cascade of failure.

6m 40s

Where this was said

Nicholas Kristof Interview: Elon Musk's USAID Lies

At 1:13:10 · chapter starts 1:11:30

Tommy frames the interview with Musk's own words: his demand that critics 'name one person' who died, his claim that USAID is responsible for COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and his dismissal of humanitarian aid as fraud. Kristof responds with names and specifics from his reporting in South Sudan, Liberia, and Uganda. Peter Dande and Evan Anzu — HIV-positive children kept alive by PEPFAR who died after health workers connecting them to the system were fired. Yama Freeman, a mother who hemorrhaged to death in a hammock carried by village men because DOGE cut the diesel for ambulances the US had already provided. Jabea, a fourth-grade girl ranked third in her class who died of malaria after DOGE eliminated bed nets, fired community health workers, stripped anti-malaria medicine from clinics, and cut ambulance fuel — a sequential cascade of failures each individually preventable for trivial sums. Kristof also describes how the DRC Ebola outbreak — 1,200+ cases, 300+ deaths — grew unchecked because USAID's early-warning networks were defunded. He is precise about limitations: mortality data collection was itself decimated by the cuts, making exact numbers impossible. But he argues the order of magnitude — hundreds of thousands of deaths per year — is fundamentally right.

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