"the funding freeze to USAID is DIRECTLY responsible for killing thousands of people" - emphasis mine

"(Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)"

Come on man...

From the article I linked:

> Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

Which links to Impact Counter [0], if you want to read more on how they reached those figures.

I think it's fair to say with absolute certainty that thousands of people have died as a direct result of dismantling USAID, but that we aren't certain of the exact magnitude. One model estimated it's around 600 thousand, but we don't have exact figures because of the disruptions.

Do you think there's a way this could be communicated more clearly? I'm not trying to be deceptive in how I present this information, and I could be persuaded to re-evaluate the exact figure if presented with a better analysis.

[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...

The implication is that the death toll is under-reported due to the disruption of the means by which those deaths would be reported and logged. In other words, those thousands of deaths are just the ones we know about.

I’m not totally sure what point you’re making, but I don’t see an inconsistency between the two portions of comment that you quoted here.

“Thousands of people” covers at least 3 orders of magnitude, depending how loose you get with the language… I don’t see the contradiction in “the error bands are wider without the high-fidelity surveillance, but even from fuzzier sources, the absolute minimum is definitely in the thousands.”

That's what honest discourse looks like.