The slashing of international aid finance has already hit the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the head of a major health fund said Wednesday, warning of a long-term impact unless the cuts were reversed.
Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that the immediate fallout from the cuts had been eased by countries switching resources but that “health outcomes” would suffer in coming years.
The Global Fund invested around $5.3 billion in the 2024-26 period, according to Sands, who said the institution was waiting for World Health Organization statistics for 2025 to see the impact of the cuts on lives.
The United States, Britain and other key donors have all cut aid funding.
“There is no doubt that the reductions in external funding have had an impact on health outcomes,” Sands, a former international banker, told reporters.
“What you saw in 2025 was countries shifting resources and prioritising immediate life-saving activities,” he said.
“Treatment, in a sense, did better than prevention, because understandably people were ensuring that people who had got ill were treated,” he added.
Aid cuts by western governments will have a longer impact on battling the diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, he warned.
“We saw a de-prioritisation of some longer-term activities in terms of training, capacity development, infrastructure development,” Sands said.
“It would be very difficult to sustain further reductions in funding without an escalating impact on health outcomes.”
Sands said he was most worried about the fight against malaria, which the WHO estimates kills more than 600,000 people a year. It is the issue “that keeps me awake at night” as spending was already “inadequate”.
The Global Fund says that since 2002 its efforts have helped save 72 million lives and reduced by 65 percent the overall death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
“Against diseases like this, if you’re not winning, you’re losing, and we need to keep winning,” he said.
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