Lancet Report Finds that Sanctions Kill 777,000 Civilians per Year

"He who fights monsters should see to it that in doing so he doesn't become a monster."

News of the enhanced suffering of the Cuban people due to the U.S. government’s enhanced embargo reminded me of a paper published last year in The Lancet titled Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis

Researchers conducted a cross-national analysis covering 152 countries from 1971 to 2021. They examined how international sanctions (primarily those imposed by the USA, EU, or UN) affect age-specific mortality rates. Data on sanctions came from the Global Sanctions Database; mortality data came from UN agencies, the World Bank, and other sources. Controls included income, education, democracy, conflict, and demographics. The authors found the following.

• Significant association with higher mortality: Sanctions—particularly unilateral, economic, and US-imposed ones—were linked to increased mortality rates across most age groups. Effects were strongest for children (especially under-5s) and older adults (60–80 years).

• Estimated annual death toll (globally, attributable to sanctions in sanctioned countries):

  • Unilateral sanctions: ~564,000 deaths per year (95% CI: 368,000–761,000).

  • Economic sanctions: ~629,000 deaths per year.

  • All sanctions combined: ~777,000 deaths per year.

• Thee figures represent roughly 3.6% of all deaths in sanctioned countries and are comparable in scale to the global mortality burden from armed conflict.

• Over the full 1971–2021 period, about 51% of attributable deaths occurred in children under 5, with 77% concentrated in children (0–15 years) and older adults (60–80 years).

I am sure there are limitations to this study, and I have asked our McCullough Foundation epidemiologist, Nic Hulscher, to run a Devil’s Advocate analysis of the study.

That said, I have no doubt that there is a strong element of truth in the report. The U.S. government has long believed it can oust bad governments with sanctions, even though there is little evidence to support this contention.

I was in Cuba in early 2023, and it was obvious to me that the only people who are suffering from the embargo are helpless civilians who are far too occupied with trying to survive to overthrow the government.

Indeed, by further strangling the common people, their economy, and their creativity, sanctions have the long term effect of making the ruling class the big fish in an ever shrinking pond of energetic people and resources.

Here is Madeleine Albright in a May 1996 Sixty Minutes interview stating that the death of half a million Iraqi children because of U.S.-led sanctions was “a price worth paying.”

This is all the more astonishing when one considers that the United States government gave billions of military and economic aid to Saddam Hussein between 1980 and 1980s in his mission to destroy Iran, and when one considers the obvious fact that the sanctions did NOT succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein.

This raises the suspicion that the entire point of the sanctions is to kill people, especially small children. The dimwit Albright may not have understood this, but what other logical inference can one make?