U2 frontman Bono claimed on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast the Trump administration’s disbandment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was responsible for some 300,000 associated deaths.
Host Rogan and Elon Musk were quick to disabuse the Irish singer of his mass-casualty claim.
“This will f— you off,” Bono warned, claiming tens of thousands of tons of food are “rotting” in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston because of recent USAID cuts and those running the warehouses have been let go, as FOX News writer Jasmine Baehr reported.
“What is that? That’s not America, is it?”
Rogan responded.
“They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said while adding there were aid groups that delivered good work the USAID system has been riddled with corruption and needed to go.
“For sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure, there was no oversight. … Trillions that are unaccounted for.”
Reacting on X to a clip of the conversation, Elon Musk slammed Bono directly.
“He’s such a liar/idiot,” Musk wrote after others had already called Bono to account for his wild, untested assertion.
FOX News made clear in its report Bono’s 300,000 figure comes not from confirmed deaths, but from a speculative model built by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University, projecting what could happen as a result of the cuts.
Nichols has said the number is a projection, not a direct count, due to the absence of real-time tracking in many affected regions.
“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable),” she wrote in the Washington Post. “And 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t.”
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