Musk Said Name One. Here Are Three.

Now, I’m just a simple man, but the arithmetic here is plain enough. In 2025, the Trump administration shut down the United States Agency for International Development. Elon Musk, as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, said he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress, “No children are dying on my watch.”

They were wrong. The names are Abdullahi, and Purity, and Ibrahim.

Abdullahi Ibrahim was ten years old. He lived in Sabon Gari, in northern Nigeria, in a one-room home. He had asthma since he was five. His father, Ibrahim Musa, drove a motorcycle taxi. When the boy couldn’t breathe, Musa sandwiched Abdullahi between his parents on that motorcycle and ran him to the clinic. The drugs were free because USAID paid for them. Then they were not free. Then the boy died.

Abdullahi told his father, “Daddy, I can’t breathe well.” Ten years old. His father is a man who works for what he has — a motorcycle, a family, a boy who needed medicine he could not buy. The nurse at Mucciya Primary Health Care, Esther Agbo, said the costs had been covered by USAID. Musa said, “Because of that support, people like us who don’t have much could still get treatment.” Then the support was gone. The drugs were no longer free. The boy died. His mother, Fatima Ibrahim, sits beside a portrait of her son in their one-room home.

Purity Wamboi was sixteen. She lived in central Nairobi. She loved to read and helped her mother wash clothes and do chores around the house. Her mother, Rachael Wanjiru, had developed a goiter and couldn’t work. Purity started coughing, developed chest pains, shivered at night. She tried to hide it. “I would ask her what was it that she was hiding,” her mother says. “She understood that I didn’t have money, and she didn’t want to stress me.” Sixteen years old, trying not to worry her mother about money.

Tabitha Mugweru is a community health promoter. That is a job — she visits families in their homes, makes medical referrals, supports the health needs of underserved communities. There used to be more of them. A whole team, fanning out across Kenya, paid with USAID money. When USAID withdrew its support, most of them stopped working. Mugweru ran into Wanjiru and Purity on the road. “They were coming from a private hospital,” she says. “I saw Purity was very weak. Purity was not doing well at all.”

Mugweru referred the family to Mwiki Health Centre. A chest X-ray revealed that Purity did not have pneumonia. She had tuberculosis. But “the TB was diagnosed very, very late.” The infection had already consumed a portion of her lungs. If those health promoters had still been doing their rounds — knocking on doors, checking on families — they might have caught it sooner. But the money was gone and the workers were gone.

Purity got new medications, but she didn’t want to take all the pills because they made her feel sick. Then came the day she asked to sit in the sunshine and have a cup of porridge. She went back inside. “She started shaking,” Mugweru says, who was there. “And then her eyes were wide open. And they turned white.” The family called an Uber to take her to the hospital. She didn’t survive the trip. “Purity died when I was holding her,” Mugweru says. Pages from Purity’s journal were found in the home. Her younger brother, James Gitau Mwai, is fourteen. He says he feels lonely without his sister as a playmate.

Ibrahim Garba was eight years old. He lived in central Nigeria. He contracted typhoid fever, likely from the drinking water. His father, Yakubu Garba, said it started like a normal sickness — fever, weakness, not eating well. The drugs were free. USAID paid. Then the fever went down and the boy did not finish the antibiotics — he was eight years old and his father was stressed. The fever came back. The drugs were no longer free. The family tried an herbal remedy and prayed. He died four days after being told they would have to pay. The boy had written “God is with us” on the wall of the family’s home.

The State Department, in its response to NPR, pointed to 32 bilateral global health memorandums of understanding as proof of a different type of foreign assistance commitment. The department did not address the specifics of the three deaths. The specific deaths are: Abdullahi Ibrahim, age ten, fatal asthma attack, Nigeria. Purity Wamboi, age sixteen, tuberculosis, Kenya. Ibrahim Garba, age eight, typhoid, Nigeria. The memorandums did not reach them in time. The “co-investment model” came too late for three children whose parents could not afford the drugs the agency was providing for free.

The administration spent months dismantling the supply chains, the community health promoters, the free medications at rural clinics. These are not things you can turn off one night and turn back on the next morning. The modeler Brooke Nichols estimates more than 700,000 people have died from the abrupt stopping of USAID, including more than half a million children. The co-investment model arrived after the medicine stopped. The children who needed it were already dead or dying.

As recently as June 28 and 29 of this year, Musk wrote on X that deaths in Africa went down after funding to USAID was cut and that those who indicate otherwise “cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!” He said this about a man who drove his dying son to a clinic on a motorcycle, about a girl who asked to sit in the sunshine before she died, about a boy who wrote “God is with us” on a wall that did not have free antibiotics.

Musk said name one. Here are three. Abdullahi Ibrahim. Purity Wamboi. Ibrahim Garba.