My initial hot-take off the cuff reaction is that it seems borderline implausible that USAID spending have reduced under 5 mortality by 1⁄3. With so many other factors like Development/Growth, government programs, Medical innovation not funded by USAID (artesunate came on the scene after 2001!), 10x-100x more effective AID like Gates/AMF etc how could this be?
The biggest under 5 effects caused by USAID might be from malaria/ORS programs, but they usually didn’t fund the staff giving the medication, so how much credit are they taking for those? They’ve claimed credit for a 51% drop in malaria mortality?
Their basic method seems to be “We calculated the associations between different levels of USAID funding per capita and decreases in mortality by group of causes (figure 1).” which seems questionable at best.
Obviously they are not considering counterfactuals here, but even not considering those it still seems like huge calls.
I’ll have a closer look later, might well be way off the mark here—the thing did get published in the Lancet after all and I’ll certainly never get anything published in there…
My initial hot-take off the cuff reaction is that it seems borderline implausible that USAID spending have reduced under 5 mortality by 1⁄3. With so many other factors like Development/Growth, government programs, Medical innovation not funded by USAID (artesunate came on the scene after 2001!), 10x-100x more effective AID like Gates/AMF etc how could this be?
The biggest under 5 effects caused by USAID might be from malaria/ORS programs, but they usually didn’t fund the staff giving the medication, so how much credit are they taking for those? They’ve claimed credit for a 51% drop in malaria mortality?
Their basic method seems to be “We calculated the associations between different levels of USAID funding per capita and decreases in mortality by group of causes (figure 1).” which seems questionable at best.
Obviously they are not considering counterfactuals here, but even not considering those it still seems like huge calls.
I’ll have a closer look later, might well be way off the mark here—the thing did get published in the Lancet after all and I’ll certainly never get anything published in there…