Atul Gawande, the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, has documented the devastating impacts of the agency’s dismantling earlier this year.
“You cannot fight an invisible problem, and there is a determined effort to make the damage visible,” Gawande said Saturday at an investigative film festival in Washington, D.C., following the premiere of “Rovina’s Choice,” a short documentary that he executive-produced. “The continued claim of the [Trump] administration is that there’s no harm done, and that aid is getting to people where it’s necessary, and it’s absolutely not true.”
In a conversation with filmmaker Charles Poe for a conversation following the screening, Gawande urged the audience to bear witness to the damage being done.