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, including a December 3 webinar described below.
The letter has already been signed by some prominent health workers, including Dr. Margaret Flowers, 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; Dr. Nidal Jboor, co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide; and Dr. Ana Malinow 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.”
Read the full letter here. Please sign and/or share it with health workers in all disciplines!
To learn how YOU can join our campaign to end US child-killing sanctions, attend the Americas Without Sanctions/SanctionsKill webinar:
Blockades and Coercive Measures: Stop the War on Children!
December 3 at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific
Register here: https://bit.ly/Sanctionskill
Dr. Margaret Flowers will host speakers from Cuba, Nicaragua, Palestine, and Venezuela discussing how deadly US sanctions impact children, and what we can do to stop this. Please join us!
