UK set to cut £150m from pledge to fight world’s deadliest infections – putting 250,000 lives at risk

Keir Starmer is set to chip in £150 million to help the international fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, putting 255,000 lives at risk. Independent he understands.

The government is preparing to announce its contribution to the Global Fund as soon as next week, in one of its first major decisions since announcing that foreign aid for defense spending would be significantly reduced.

The Prime Minister is expected to commit £850 million to the work of the Global Fund over the next three years; This is a 15 per cent reduction compared to the UK’s last pledge of £1 billion in 2022, which was below the £1.4 billion pledge in 2019.

The government has stated that it will use the UK’s aid budget to prioritize global health, as well as humanitarian aid in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. He named the Global Fund, along with the global vaccine alliance Gavi, as organizations aiming to get a larger share of aid spending.

However, the UK is making cuts to funding, which could jeopardize plans to raise $18 billion to save 23 million lives between 2027 and 2029. Worldwide NGO the ONE campaign calculates that the UK’s £1 billion pledge will translate into 1.7 million lives; So a £150 million drop would result in an estimated 255,000 deaths.

Andrew Mitchell, the former secretary of state for international development, said Britain’s cut was a “bitter pill to swallow”.

“Not only for the thousands of people who will lose their lives, but also for the many people who are proud of the work Britain has done to prevent deaths from malaria, HIV/Aids and tuberculosis, which is now being curtailed by the first Labor government to cut development spending,” the Conservative MP added.

David Mundell, co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on HIV/Aids, said the decision was “seriously disappointing”.

“Obviously there are restrictions on funding,” he said, “but the Global Fund has a good track record in terms of service delivery and so it is one of the most effective ways to provide funding.”

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said the UK continues to work with the Global Fund to “play a key role in the global response to tackling diseases globally” and that the commitment will be announced in due course.

“We are firmly committed to tackling global health challenges, not only because it is right, but also to help deliver the Plan for Change in the UK, supporting global stability and growth.”

Until funding cuts, particularly from the United States, took effect earlier this year, the world was on track to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. It is now predicted that there will be potentially millions of extra deaths in the coming years.

“Unplanned outages, like the US outages, always have negative consequences for the people supported,” Mundell added. Independent Number of deaths linked to Donald Trump’s cuts to HIV services in low-income countries.

The Global Fund covers a quarter of all international HIV treatment and prevention programmes, more than half of malaria programmes, and three-quarters of TB support. It is estimated to have saved 70 million lives in the last 20 years.

It is mostly funded by contributions from more than 80 governments, as well as the private sector and philanthropy. Currently, the UK is the third largest donor and is co-hosting the fundraiser in South Africa on 21 November.

When Trump took office, the USA withheld the money it had already promised for 2025 from the Global Fund, and this had disastrous consequences. Countries supported by the fund had to immediately cut at least 10 percent of their operations.

When Independent In programs we visited recently in Senegal, we saw people with disabilities die due to lack of transportation to access life-saving medicines; hospitals can no longer provide food kits to malnourished patients; and struggles to continue distributing preventive HIV drugs.

“Over the past year, the United States has provided more than $60 million in health assistance programs to Senegal to address its most urgent health needs, including HIV prevention and treatment,” a US State Department spokesperson said.

Dr. from the tuberculosis modeling group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Katherine Horton found cuts to the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund would lead to thousands of extra deaths. Tuberculosis kills more people worldwide each year than any other infectious disease.

“Global health is really seriously strained right now because of the U.S. cutbacks that have already taken place. So, in the wake of the U.S. cutbacks, I think there’s a real need for other countries to contribute whatever they can to try to fill some of that gap.”

Dr Horton said TB programs had been successful in reducing deaths and reducing the threat of the disease spreading across borders.

“Further disruptions will cause greater disruption and greater harm to global health systems and individual lives.”

This article was produced as part of The Independent. Rethinking Global Aid project