Has the US sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza?

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Hello and thanks for downloading the More Or Less podcast.

We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and I'm Charlotte MacDonald.

It feels like the Trump administration is rapidly becoming our bread and butter.

We actually have to restrain ourselves from checking their numbers out too much for fear of them thinking we fancy them or something.

Why are you so obsessed with me?

It's not you, it's us.

We just love dodgy numbers.

Actually, I guess it is you.

You tease.

Anyway, this week we're checking them, I mean, their facts out.

Specifically, this humdinger of a fact from White House press secretary Caroline Levitt.

Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.

Um

50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.

50 million.

And you know what's happened to them?

They've used them as a method of making bombs.

How about that?

How about that indeed?

The number in classic style then got bigger.

$100 million

on condoms.

To Hamas.

Cryke.

Can any of this possibly be true?

Has the US really been funding a condom cavalry?

So I actually was watching the White House press conference live and my jaw dropped.

I'm Matthew Kavanaugh.

I'm the director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

It was just a striking claim and I immediately looked it up and became very clear that it wasn't true.

This used to be a fairly easy one to fact check.

All you needed to do was to go on the website for the United States Agency for International Development, aka USAID, and look into the data from their most recent reports.

There is a report, or was a report, of all of their condom procurement that showed that none of it had gone to Gaza.

But as of the 1st of February, that report has now been taken down, along with the entire US Agency for International Development website.

When the USAID website was still live, there was a report that told you exactly how much money went to Gaza and what it was used for.

A process that our next guest was very familiar with.

My name is Jeremy Knindike.

I'm the president of Refugees International and I previously served twice at USAID in the Obama and Biden administrations.

The USAID data set showed that two lots of 50 million US dollars had been earmarked for the International Medical Corps or IMC, a humanitarian organization that provides emergency medical care across the globe.

So the administration was correct about the money, just not what it was for.

So they pointed at one point to funding that was going to field hospitals in Gaza.

That was about $50 million, but of course that was for field hospitals.

I have no idea where they got the notion that it was for condoms.

Nor did the IMC.

They released this statement in response to the funding being cut.

No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.

Instead, the money was used for the safe deliveries of approximately 20 babies per day, the operation of one of only three neonatal icus in all of gaza which provides the operation of one of gaza's only stabilization centers the operation of an extremely busy emergency room that receives up to 200 patients a day and an outpatient department this makes much more sense because if anyone had really stopped to think about it 50 million us dollars worth of condoms to gaza is a pretty big number i've worked in hiv aids programming i've worked around relief and global health programs for a long time.

My first question when I heard that figure was, well, how many condoms would that buy?

And the U.S.

government buys condoms in bulk, and it gets a price of between four to five cents per condom.

So $50 million would buy you a billion condoms.

To put this into context.

There's only a million people in Gaza that are above the age of 18.

And so we're actually talking about multiple condoms every day for every person in Gaza.

This simply isn't happening.

The US does not send condoms into Gaza.

If you looked at USAID's now sadly departed data sets, you'd see that the only place in the Middle East that received any money for contraceptives was Jordan.

90% of all condoms procured by the United States went to African countries.

Condom access is a hugely effective way to prevent the transmission of HIV.

And so as part of through what's called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, that was a George Bush program that made just extraordinary progress in slowing and beginning to reverse the global HIV pandemic.

Condoms are a really fundamental part of that.

And so the U.S., you know, in an average year in recent years, would supply about half a billion condoms globally around the world.

primarily to countries in Africa, but also to other countries and other parts of the world that have a high burden of HIV.

In 2023, the US spent $61 million in foreign aid donations for contraceptives across multiple countries.

Contraceptives include all contraceptive IUDs as well as condoms.

The money spent on condoms was around 20 million US dollars.

So the US isn't even spending 50 million US dollars on condoms globally, let alone in Gaza.

So where did the confusion come from?

Well, if you looked at the data, which, remember, has now gone, you could see where some wires might have been crossed.

There is no money, as far as I can tell, going to Gaza for condom procurement.

You know, this could actually be funding that is going to the Gaza province of Mozambique.

Some condoms have been sent to Mozambique, condoms that are roughly 5,500 kilometers away from Hamas.

We did contact Doge and the State Department to ask for comment, but they didn't respond.

However, a reporter asked Elon Musk in person during his surprise visit to the Oval Office press conference on the 11th of February.

So can you correct the statements?

It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually.

It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there.

And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?

Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.

And in fact, the IMC issued an update to say that.

The US government has approved funding to cover hospital service through mid-April.

The claim may have been resolved, but there is still a question about why the administration are going after USAID.

But

if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, okay, that's not as bad, but still,

why are we doing that?

That money is incredibly well spent because stopping a pandemic, preventing the next pandemic, is one of the most important foreign policy issues out there.

And so the idea that this is somehow charity is actually really a wrong way to think about what this money is largely doing.

Doge's mandate is to save the US government money.

But at the end of the day, the USAID budget isn't a particularly huge slice of the U.S.

budgetary pie.

Foreign aid is less than 1% of the U.S.

federal budget.

Most Americans think it's somewhere on the order of 25%.

For that, not quite 1%,

the U.S.

is able to do tremendous things in the world.

Under the United States Constitution, the president is not authorized to simply shut down an agency.

And in fact, the president is not even authorized to not spend the money that Congress has appropriated to the agency.

And so it's actually being litigated right now.

Several judges have already found that several parts of that order are not allowed.

And we'll see in the weeks ahead what else gets struck down.

We'll be keeping our eye on it.

After all, we are obsessed with them.

thanks to Matthew Kavanagh and Jeremy Kanundike.

And by the way, the strangest part of that story, Hamas using condoms to make bombs seems to be true.

Fighters from Gaza have been known to send booby-trap balloons over the border to Israel.

Israel doesn't differentiate between the inflatables used, calling them all balloon bombs.

So really, we have no idea how many condoms are used as weapons.

That's all we have time for this week.

Please keep your questions and comments coming in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk.

Until next week, goodbye.

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