When the Trump Administration ordered USAID to cease critical foreign-aid payments, the nonprofit advocacy organization Global Health Council pushed back. Council president and executive director Elisha Dunn-Georgiou in March put her organization forward as a plaintiff in a case resulting in the Supreme Court letting a lower court order stand, and the U.S. was required to resume payments.
When people tell Dunn-Georgiou that she’s brave for challenging the Trump Administration’s dismantling of U.S. global health assistance, she replies, “Yes, but I have heat, water, and medicine.” Many don’t, she says, like health workers in Africa helping women deliver babies at closed clinics and patients sharing their antiviral medicine with friends near death. “Those are the amazing stories.”
Dunn-Georgiou comes from decades of global health advocacy. “We have more fight in us because we’re used to uphill battles,” she says. What’s different now is the need to defend causes that weren’t previously questioned, like feeding starving children. She uses scientific evidence to educate policymakers on the importance of global assistance and U.S. support for the World Health Organization. She is now preparing for the Supreme Court to potentially revisit U.S. funding of foreign aid. “To lose all of that health care is a cataclysmic event,” she says. “We’re up against a misinformation machine intent on destruction. We’re trying to hold the line.”