After looking up more stuff I think small & medium EA donors have at least a few solid options to beat GiveWell All Grants & EA Animal Welfare Fund and I personally am adjusting over 25% of my giving to them…

Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)

The cost per DALY (healthy year of life gained) on LEEP is like 5-10x better than the best GiveWell interventions like malaria bed-nets. Instead of taking $50 to get a healthy year of life their estimate is like $5 for lead elimination programs. I gather this is because they can leverage policy changes in government & companies to remove lead from many many products & because some products like house paint may be around a lot of people for a lot of time. Please comment if you know of any other factors affecting their DALY estimates.

Shrimp Welfare Project

Usual arguments: number of animals involved, ease of stunning intervention to avoid suffering, neglected, etc.
https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think?r=87ph2&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay 

Screwworm Elimination

Arguments listed in previous comment.

@DavidNash 

I think a point here is based off last year’s executive cuts & statements we expected like a 50% global health cut officially put into the budget, but we are actually only seeing like a 25% cut.

It’s true that Trump may still solely & unlawfully block spending, but this indicates those actions would likely not continue beyond his term & also the resulting suffering & deaths would really be solely on him.

Getting used to a camper van may only make sense if you really plan to work in like SF tech where housing costs are out of control. Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to try maintaining a good relationship with family / friends, work on being a really good/easy room-mate, & then rent a cheap room from family/friends into adulthood to save more money.

More from the researcher…

“If everything went perfectly, from this early stage research to clinical trials to broad deployment, we’d treat about 5% of the current causes of death (most but not all of the 7% chronic respiratory disease category, not pneumonia). It could theoretically be higher if there are e.g. positive effects on cardiovascular disease from healthy lungs, but those kinds of nebulous benefits are hard to predict.

To be clear though I'm sure you know, like all preclinical research it is many millions of dollars and very high chance of failure away from hitting that 5%.”

MRNA lung researcher replied:

“… my lead indication is not one of those 3 (Pneumonia, COPD, Asthma), but the further indications I'm testing with my approach does include one of those!”

So this may eventually lead to something to help with a like 2.5%-4.4% cause of death disease.

So I don’t know if it really passes a GiveWell All Grants cost effectiveness threshold at this point without more strong commitment to target something significant like Pneumonia.

I’m very skeptical 90% of these options are better than GiveWell All Grants & EA Animal Welfare Fund, but the following two seem like they could be significantly better:

Screwworm Elimination Advocacy

https://manifund.org/projects/anti-screwworm-gene-drive-advocacy
On a per animal basis screwworms are likely much much worse than factory farming as animals are essentially being tortured to death so it may have extra importance. Also elimination could mean a lot of counterfactual suffering averted at lower costs. And given agriculture/rancher interests align with animal welfare here it is more tractable.

MRNA For Lung Diseases

https://manifund.org/projects/mrna-for-pulmonary-fibrosis
The importance of this one is highly dependent on if this intervention could also help in causes of death (CopD/Asthma/Pneumonia/Other-Lung-Diseases 11% of deaths) more common than other neglected diseases like malaria 1.1% deaths, HIV 1.5% deaths, TB 2% deaths. And given lung diseases are also relatively more common in rich countries than other neglected diseases, it may be more tractable to get more funding once it has been pushed past a couple hurdles.

Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas

https://michaelgris.com/posts/charity-tax/

Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas

https://michaelgris.com/posts/charity-tax/

Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas

https://michaelgris.com/posts/charity-tax/

See this piece for more on optimizing tax deductions with charitable giving

https://michaelgris.com/posts/charity-tax/