A recent study published in October of this year in The Lancet, a world-leading weekly journal of general medical science founded in 1823, found “a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality.” The study tracked the effects of U.S. sanctions on age-specific mortality rates for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021.
International sanctions, the study explains, are restrictions on international transactions imposed often by the U.S. and countries it strong-arms into joining it in pursuit of its foreign policy objectives. While economic sanctions are those that restrict trade or financial transactions, non-economic sanctions are considered those that deal with arms trade, military assistance, travel, or other issues.
Researchers also distinguished between unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the E.U. and multilateral sanctions like those applied by the U.N.
Sanctions lead to declines in public revenues in sanctioned countries, reductions in foreign exchange earnings, and barriers to humanitarian aid. This can impact the quantity and quality of public health and the availability of essential imports, especially in countries like Cuba, such as medical supplies, food, and other goods.
The study found the strongest damaging effects coming from unilateral and economic U.S. sanctions, whereas it found no statistical evidence of an effect for U.N. sanctions. Researchers estimate that unilateral U.S.-related sanctions were associated with a toll of almost 600,000 deaths per year for the 50-year period under study, “similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.” That means that between 1971 and 2021, sanctions resulted in the death of 30,000,000 people in the sanctioned countries. Since 2021, U.S. use of sanctions against other countries has actually increased drastically.
Sanctions are used against both developing and developed countries. China and Russia are heavily sanctioned, and recently, countries like Brazil have been added to the list because President Trump disagrees with that country’s prosecution of its former right-wing, criminal president.
According to researchers, this study provides “the first estimates of the effect of economic sanctions” on children, adults, and the elderly, and the methods used allowed them “to derive quantitative estimates of deaths associated with sanctions at a global level.”
Now more sanctions than ever
According to calculations made using the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), 25 percent of all countries were subject to some type of sanctions by either the U.S., the E.U., or the U.N. from 2010 to 2022. In comparison, during the 1960s, only an average of 8 percent of all countries were subject to similar sanctions.
The study’s findings are consistent with those of previous research, which has also found “significant negative effects of sanctions on various indicators of living conditions in targeted countries, including economic growth and health outcomes.”
However, its contribution in advancing the existing research lies in its “framework for identifying a causal relationship from sanctions to mortality with greater confidence than the primarily correlational findings of previous studies.”
Moreover, their nuanced data analysis disaggregates the effects of sanctions regimes from “the aggregate summary measure used previously,” allowing them to more clearly assess the effect of sanctions on the death rates of different subpopulations.
For example, researchers found the most severe impacts of global sanctions in children younger than 1 year, followed by the 60–80 years age segment. Altogether, deaths of children younger than 5 years represented 51 percent of total deaths caused by sanctions over the 1970–2021 period.
Activists fight for peace
“These findings raise an important question for policy debates,” the researchers wrote. “What role, if any, should economic and unilateral sanctions have in the foreign policies of the countries or organizations imposing them?”
While those approaching sanctions from a consequentialist perspective might consider whether the negative consequences of the sanctions outweigh the benefits of the stated goals of those sanctions, from a rights-based perspective, evidence that sanctions lead to losses in lives is reason enough to fight for the suspension of their use.
On December 3, the SanctionsKill campaign and partners invited speakers to discuss the impact of these measures on children in four countries—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Palestine—during a webinar called “Blockades and Coercive Measures: Stop the War on Children!”
The occasion was also the launch of a letter campaign in which health workers are asking the United States Congress and Executive Branch to stop applying these coercive measures because they kill as many people as armed conflict—mostly children.
Impact on Cuba
The program opened with a clip from a new Al-Jazeera documentary titled “Cuba: Healthcare Under Sanctions,” which illustrates how Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions against Cuba are causing extreme shortages of medicine and health equipment for healthcare workers to provide care.
Cuba’s foreign ministry’s latest report on the adverse effects of the lengthy U.S. economic blockade of Cuba indicates that Cuba’s infant mortality rate has risen from 4.2 in 2014 to 8.2 presently. Furthermore, demographers note a decrease in life expectancy of 5.39 years since 2012.
Dr. Mariuska Forteza Sáez of Cuba was among the invited panel speakers and sent video greetings. Zoom does not allow users in the nation to access services “for regulatory reasons,” according to its website.
As Chief of Pediatric Oncology at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology, she spoke with pride of Cuba’s 65 percent cancer survival rate, an impressive achievement for a low-income country. However, because of U.S. sanctions, Cuban healthcare providers have to find alternatives and adapt many treatment protocols in order to achieve and maintain the current survival rate, she said.
The highly specialized treatments she works on also require continuous training and research. But, because of the blockade, Forteza explained, Cuban doctors are cut off from collegial exchange and learning opportunities, citing St. Jude Hospital in the U.S. as one of the world-recognized centers for research and training that Cubans cannot access.
Palestine suffers from sanctions
Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, a Palestinian refugee from Dheisheh Refugee camp in the West Bank and Executive Director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), spoke about the inheritance of trauma that Palestinian children carry as a result of generations of settler colonial displacement, blockades, sanctions, and human rights violations.
Today’s genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process of violence and erasure that began in 1948, what Shamrouch referred to as “slow” or “silent” genocide. Through blockades and sanctions seeking to limit the mobility of Palestinians and restrict access to food, medicine, and health treatment, Israel’s apartheid state subjects Palestinians to collective punishment.
“The main target for the blockade is the children inside Gaza,” Shamrouch asserted after noting that 50 percent of the population of this small strip of land is young people below the age of 18. By targeting the children, the Israeli war machine targets the future of Palestinians.
A new report estimates that an alarming 71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition as 470,000 people in Gaza face “catastrophic hunger… and the entire population [experiences] acute food insecurity.”
Sanctions aimed at Nicaragua
Yorlis Luna, an indigenous beekeeper and educator from Nicaragua, expressed her solidarity with the Palestinian people before sharing her personal experience growing up with little access to healthcare.
After the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, the U.S.-backed Contras waged a violent counterrevolutionary offensive against the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN, or the Sandinistas), generating a bloody civil war. To bring an end to the war, Nicaragua held an election which, tainted with U.S. interference, brought the neoliberal conservative Violeta Chamorro into the presidency. To the delight of the IMF and World Bank, Chamorro issued privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization, leading to increased inequality, poverty, corruption, and social conflict.
Luna explained how growing up during those years, she lost hearing in one ear because her mother could simply not afford the needed medicine. As a teenager, she saw the return to power of the Sandinistas in 2007 and witnessed tremendous improvements in daily life.
“I remember—I was 16 years old—that feeling of joy when I arrived at the hospital and for the first time they gave me a packet of medicine for my ear. I remember like it was yesterday, that feeling of dignity and value,” she said, adding that sanctions seek to destroy the spirit of resistance in people.
“It is like a constant humiliation… sanctions really have an impact, and they have an especially cruel impact on childhood,” Luna asserted.
Nicaragua continues to be targeted with unilateral sanctions from the U.S., along with a third of the world population, and remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. However, since 2007, it has managed to reduce maternal mortality by almost 80 percent, reduce neonatal mortality by more than 60 percent, and reduce infant mortality rates by almost the same margin. Luna says that the country is also resisting by becoming food sovereign and relying more on indigenous medicines and other local products to make themselves less vulnerable to economic aggression and empower communities.
Venezuela a special target
Alison Bodine, a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network, a coalition of well over a dozen organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Britain, spoke about the impact of sanctions on the South American country. Recent U.S. military buildup against Venezuela over the past few months has made international news, but Venezuela has been under the crosshairs of U.S. hostilities for decades.
In 2002, the administration of George W. Bush backed a military coup against Hugo Chávez before mass public protests foiled the anti-democracy plotters. The U.S. first imposed sanctions in 2005/2006 in response to Venezuela’s alleged lack of cooperation on anti-drug and counter-terrorism efforts.
In 2015, President Obama imposed sanctions and declared in an executive order that Venezuela posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Under Trump’s first and second administration, Venezuela has faced intense attacks through several sanctions targeting the nation’s oil industry, a coup attempt in 2019, and a $50 million bounty on Nicolás Maduro’s head for allegedly running a cartel that Pino Arlacchire, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, regards as “a creature of Trumpian imagination.”
Bodine cited reports that estimated 100,000 excess deaths or more in the country were the result of sanctions.
In targeting Venezuela’s oil industry, the U.S. seeks to eke out concessions to its Big Oil industry while at the same time cutting off Venezuela’s state-owned companies from markets and profits, which the government redirects towards public housing, schools, and hospitals.
“The sanctions took away from Venezuela’s ability to more fully develop and fund those programs… and that is by design, is on purpose. They are really intended to hurt the most vulnerable people,” Bodine said.
Difficulties with banking transactions due to sanctions, for example, have prevented Venezuelan children from receiving life-saving medical treatment such as specialized cancer treatment overseas.
Civic action happening
The webinar, organized by Americas Without Sanctions, a project of SanctionsKill, was moderated by Dr. Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance and SanctionsKill, and Dr. Adlah Sukkar of Doctors Against Genocide.
Drs. Flowers and Sukkar explained the Health Workers Letter campaign. All health workers—including public and mental health workers, currently in training, working, or retired—are invited to sign on to ask the U.S. government to stop applying these fatal measures.
“In early 2026, we will begin organizing pressure on members of Congress…meeting with members of Congress, and this is something that everyone could be part of… whether you are a healthcare professional or not,” Flowers said, adding that “2026 is an election year, and this is an excellent opportunity… to make [members of Congress] aware of how dire this is, how inhumane it is that we are killing so many children around the world.”
Highlighting the work of Doctors Against Genocide, Sukkar underscored how members of the organization are on the hill monthly to talk with lawmakers.
“I really do think our presence has an impact. I wasn’t even aware that these were public buildings that we could just go into and really talk with our elected officials. And so I think that our presence, our voice, is really important to deliver these vital messages,” Sukkar said.
“It’s sad, actually, the lack of knowledge on what we’re actually inflicting around the world,” Sukkar added, reflecting on encounters with staffers and elected officials.
“And even if you can’t appeal to it from the pure moral perspective of why it’s just so wrong, you know, understanding the boomerang effect on what’s going to come back, so, I just encourage everyone to get involved,” Sukkar concluded.
Promoters of sanctions in the U.S. tout the measures as a more “humane” way of getting other nations to comply with U.S. global interests. However, the study confirms what activists have been saying for years: sanctions kill.
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