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Poor aerospace and automotive engineering can also kill. Ask Boeing how that's working out for them (hundreds of deaths from the MAX debacle). SpaceX has a surprisingly good, if imperfect, record, but Tesla seems to get a surprising number of OSHA complaints, and some of their vehicle design decisions (the emergency door release in the back seat of the 3 series, and such) suggest they don't take safety as seriously as Toyota, much less Volvo.
Something as simple as humanitarian aid suspension for a few weeks will kill more people than every act of shoddy automotive and aerospace engineering in the last twenty years put together.
I feel like people have difficulty grasping the difference in scale of even very large corporations versus government operations, and hence what is at stake. "Move fast and break things" is an ethos that works fine in tech where you're designing new commercial products and the worst that happens is you waste some money or cause a minor accident or invent digital heroin. It's not an ethos that works well for critical systems.
I suppose that's true, but I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes. Deaths at the hand of the government outside of wartime are pretty small in number (cops shooting people, the death penalty, maybe bad disaster planning). The PEPFAR example I'd broadly agree with, but the emotional valence of "caused death" versus "didn't save life" strikes me as not quite equivalent: if you accept that wholesale, then how many have you killed by not liquidating your life savings and giving to EA causes?
On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives. And the anti-car folks (I am not a hardcore believer) might have you found the tens of thousands of motor vehicle fatalities there in the US annually against the industry too.
I'm not sure this is true. People tend not to fuck around with critical systems unless they absolutely have to, so visible high impact decisions tend to be rare. But I think the typical bad government decision looks more like an act of over/under/misregulation with wide-reaching consequences. Things like overly restrictive drug approval processes, inadequate clean air standards, bad land use laws, etc... And there's also more tail risk with government policy. Corporations mostly aren't tasked with public health or maintaining critical transit infrastructure or public order. The last time I'm aware of that a corporation caused a famine was when the East India Company was acting as the de facto government of Bengal, etc...
I picked on PEPFAR in particular because it is an existing program. It's true that the US could save more lives if it were willing to spend more money, but with PEPFAR you can point to specific people who depend on the program. You can point more broadly to any medical/healthcare program - breaking Medicare/Medicaid would lead to a lot of people losing healthcare access.
I guess we're dealing a different intuition around blame, because I see these as fundamentally regulatory failures. Same with motor vehicle fatalities - private companies may build the cars and private citizens may drive them, but traffic laws and vehicle standards are set by the government.
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Messing up the international relations that have led to 80 years with no use of nuclear weapons in combat has the potential to kill orders of magnitude more people than "hundreds" (and yes that's mostly Putin, and even on the less-culpable US side it's mostly Trump, but Musk is wading in a bit too).
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