Press Release, November 2025
SanctionsKill/Americas Without Sanctions
Today, the SanctionsKill campaign is inviting health workers around the United States to sign our letter to the US government urging it to stop the use of unilateral coercive measures (“sanctions”) because they are as deadly as armed conflict and primarily kill children. The letter will be presented to the US Congress and Executive Branch in early 2026, and will be the subject of various campaign activities.
The letter has already been signed by some prominent health workers, including Margaret Flowers, MD, a pediatrician and long-time health reform advocate; Amy Hagopian, PhD, professor emeritus, University of Washington, and former chair, International Health Section of the American Public Health Association; Nidal Jboor, MD, co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide; and Ana Malinow, MD of National Single Payer.
The letter highlights the findings of the most comprehensive study to date of economic sanctions, covering 152 sanctioned countries over a 50-year period. The study, published August 2025 in the prestigious, peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, found that economic coercive measures—especially the sanctions imposed by the US government—cause over 560,000 deaths worldwide every year, and a majority of the dead are children under 5.
Our Health Workers’ Letter details how sanctions are particularly deadly for small children because they:
- Provoke increases in water-borne illnesses and diarrheal diseases
- Cause low birth weight in children
- Cause increases in hunger and malnutrition
- Deny children lifesaving cancer care and organ transplants
- Make it harder to import antibiotics and other common medicines
- Hinder sanctioned countries from receiving assistance during natural disasters.
As the letter concludes: “This study is not alone, but rather cements a clear consensus in the economic literature that broad unilateral economic sanctions have devastating health and humanitarian consequences for civilian populations.
This is a global public health crisis caused by US government policy. We implore you to fulfill your inescapable obligation to end it, as surely as you would prohibit the use of a defective medicine or faulty equipment causing comparable harm.
Imposing such collective punishment on the innocent is morally reprehensible. It must stop.”
Please read the full letter HERE and please sign if you are a Health Worker!
As a Community Health Worker in training, I care about the health and wellbeing of children around the world. Please help them to grow up and thrive!
For sure sanctions are a form of war, just a slightly different method than a shooting war.
Sanctions murdered almost a million Iraqi children. Sanctions and tge illegal USA Blockade on Cuba has murdered many Cubans. Sanctions on Iran, Venezuela gave also murdered hundreds of thousands denying them medicines, medical care. Sanctions against the Palestinians in Gaza have murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians denying them food, potable water, water for bathing, medicine, medical care, hospitals, ambulances, doctors, home to live in, clean clothes, shoes, etc. This MUST end!