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It's $3,000+ to prevent a statistical death from malaria, last I checked, and probably not as simple as $30B saving 10 million statistical lives.
Yes, I was joking about $100. It's not $3,000 either and probably not even $30,000.
In any case, even though I don't believe the numbers, I donate anyway just in case they are accurate.
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$3K is now at the bottom end of GiveWell's estimates, which go up to $8K on the high end. Maybe some of that increase is better data, but I suspect that some of it is just that the marginal cost of preventing malaria deaths goes up as the number of deaths already prevented does. In the limit, if everyone has an insecticidal bednet, but there's still spread via mosquito bites of people who are awake, what do you do next?
Gates donated some money for bednets, and a little more for anti-mosquito gene drive research, but at some point the Gates Foundation seems to have gone all-in on funding malaria vaccine research instead. Whether this was a good idea (a really effective vaccine could make malaria go the way of smallpox, not just continually fight the problem with nets that wear out every few years) or a bad idea (current generation vaccines are like 33% effective and won't be driving anything extinct) is still an open question IMHO.
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