Quick takes

Gavi's investment opportunity for 2026-2030 says they expect to save 8 to 9 million lives, for which they would require a budget of at least $11.9 billion[1]. Unfortunately, Gavi only raised $9 billion, so they have to make some cuts to their plans[2]. And you really can't reduce spending by $3 billion without making some life-or-death decisions. Gavi's CEO has said that "for every $1.5 billion less, your ability to save 1.1 million lives is compromised"[3]. This would equal a marginal cost of $1,607 $1,363 per life saved, which seems a bit low to me. But I think there is a good chance Gavi's marginal cost per life saved is still cheap enough to clear GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar. GiveWell hasn't made grants to Gavi, though. Why? ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/investing/funding/resource-mobilisation/Gavi-Investment-Opportunity-2026-2030.pdf, pp. 20 & 43 ↩︎ 2. https://www.devex.com/news/gavi-s-board-tasked-with-strategy-shift-in-light-of-3b-funding-gap-110595 ↩︎ 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02270-x ↩︎

An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from "Days of Fire" by Peter Baker. I found this moving.

I admire influential orgs that publicly change their mind due to external feedback, and GiveWell is as usual exemplary of this (see also their grant "lookbacks"). From their recently published Progress on Issues We Identified During Top Charities Red Teaming, here's how external feedback changed their bottomline grantmaking: Some self-assessed progress that caught my eye — incomplete list, full one here; these "led to important errors or... worsened the credibility of our research" (0 = no progress made, 10 = completely resolved): (As an aside, I've noticed plenty of claims of GW top charity-beating cost-effectiveness figures both on the forum and elsewhere, and I basically never give them the credence I'd give to GW's own estimates, due to the kind of (usually downward) adjustments mentioned above like receiving interventions from other sources or between-program interventions, and GW's sheer reasoning thoroughness behind those adjustments, seriously, click on any of those "(more)"s) Some other issues they'd "been aware of at the time of red teaming and had deprioritized but that we thought were worth looking into following red teaming" — again incomplete list, full one here: I always had the impression GW engaged outside experts a fair bit, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn they thought they weren't doing enough of it and then actually followed through so seriously, this is an A+ example of organisational commitment to and follow-through on self-improvement so I'd like to quote this section in full: Some quick reactions: * I like that GW thinks they should allocate more time to expert conversations vs desk research in most cases * I like that GW are improving their own red-teaming process by having experts review their work in parallel * I too am keen to see what CGD find out re: why GW top-recommended programs aren't funded by other groups you'd expect to do so * the Zipline exploratory grant is very cool, I raved about it previously * I wouldn't

The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines? 

The Ezra Klein Show (one of my favourite podcasts) just released an episode with GiveWell CEO Elie Hassenfeld!

Indoor tanning is really bad for people's health; it significantly increases one's risk of getting skin cancer.[1] Many countries already outlaw minors from visiting indoor tanning salons. However, surprisingly, there are only two countries, Australia and Brazil, that have banned indoor tanning for adults, too. I think that doing policy advocacy for a complete ban on indoor tanning in countries around the world has the potential to be a highly cost-effective global health intervention. Indoor tanning ban policy advocacy seems to check all three boxes of the ITN framework: it is highly neglected; it affects many people (indoor tanning is surprisingly popular: over 10 percent of adults around the world have tanned indoors[2]), and thus has the potential to have a big impact; and also, I think it could be quite tractable (passing laws is never easy, but is should be doable, because the indoor tanning lobby appears to be much less powerful than, say, the tobacco or alcohol lobbies). ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/surprising-facts-about-indoor-tanning ↩︎ 2. https://www.aad.org/media/stats-indoor-tanning ↩︎

It's mind-blowing to me that AMF's immediate funding gap is $462M for 2027-29. That's 56-154,000 lives (mostly under-5 children) at $3-8k per life saved, maybe fewer going forward due to evolving resistance to insecticides, but it wouldn't change the bottomline that this seems to be a gargantuan ball dropped. Last time AMF's immediate funding gap was over $300M for 2024-26, so it's grown 50%(!) this time round. Both times the main culprit was the same, the Global Fund's funding replenishment shortfall vs target, which affects programmatic planning in countries. I'd like to think we're collectively doing our part (e.g. last year GiveWell directed $150M to AMF, more than to any other charity, which by their reckoning is expected to save ~27k lives over the next 1-2 years), but it's still nuts to me that such a longstanding high-profile "shovel-ready" giving opportunity as AMF can still have such a big and growing gap!

The NPR podcast Planet Money just released an episode on GiveWell.