Garrett on Global Health

Dear friends and colleagues,

For nearly two decades, there has been a positive, dreamy side to globalization, a vision shared from five-star hotel rooms in Davos all the way to unnamed alleys of Soweto. Building on the 1948 founding of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its stated mission of health for all, the early twenty-first century saw billions of dollars moving yearly from the wealthy world to poorer countries, which financed treatments, medical systems, public health infrastructures, safe water and waste disposal, training and education for millions of health workers, routine vaccination against a raft of microbes, and rapid responses against dangerous outbreaks.

From that dream emerged institutions like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI); Roll Back Malaria; the Global Health Security Agenda, and thousands of nongovernmental and humanitarian organizations. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), followed by the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), represented UN targets for raising life expectancies, slashing acute poverty, and improving equity and education worldwide.