Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding for lifesaving work.

“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,” they began.

The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, indicating that a tumultuous period when the Trump administration said it was freezing projects for ostensible review was over, and that any faint hope American assistance might continue had ended.

Many were projects that had received a waiver from the freeze because the State Department previously identified its work as essential and lifesaving.

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”