#Global Health Quotes

“For all these infectious diseases, the goal is to eventually get rid of them. And to do that we need to invent new tools, but nobody was doing that because there was no money to buy on behalf of the poorest, even the existing tools.”

“As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.”

“President [George] Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy.”

“If you're a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you'll never have heard of Bill Gates.”

“Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.”

“Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.”

“Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have - whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.”

“I do normal kind of contributions, particularly for people who are going over to Africa and help highlighting global health, and that's tended to be pretty bipartisan in nature because of the coalition there exists fortunately around these global health issues. But I don't think my backing, putting a lot of money into political contributions is a way I'm going to try and help improve the world.”

“Thinking about impact on children meant adding to the agenda, both the R&D agenda and the delivery agenda, but it's amazing news, even in the scale of other tragedies.”

“If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.”

“The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.”

“Going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk - I was with young girls in south Africa - understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them.”

“The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.”

“If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.”