Thread by @carolinefiennes

Anti-malaria bednets are cheap & effective at preventing a common & fatal disease. It is not OK to write in int'l newspapers claiming they fail. So Prof Paul Garner of the Liverpool School of - !! - Tropical Medicine & I wrote in The Economist in response to the recent letter:🧵

2/ Here are the citations: 
Study of use: malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11….
Study of effects (there as zillions of these): 
- Cochrane study: cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10…
- 'Oxford' study of large-scale effects: nature.com/articles/natur…

3/ On the persistent trope about bednets getting used for fishing:
a. According to Pascaline Dupas at Stanford, fishing communities are only 1% of Africa's communities at risk of malaria (!)(web.stanford.edu/~pdupas/Dupas_…). And

4/ b. Bednets don't last forever (they get holes etc.) So even if some are used for fishing, that doesn't prove that that they weren't used over beds. (None of which is a comment on the effect of bednets on fish-stocks. I'm only talking about bednets primary goal re malaria.)

5/ As mentioned, I asked Alex Nicholls, who wrote the original letter, what specific prog he was referring to, and what evaluation/s he was citing. (

https://twitter.com/carolinefiennes/status/1449328696653975555

)
He hasn't replied...

6/ And in fact, the only bednet programme cited in the article to which Alex Nicholls referred is *hypothetical* - so it makes no sense for him to claim to know its results(!)

7/ Also as mentioned, I have no professional or commercial interest in bednets. I don't work in that at all! Just trying to keep people alive. By trying to direct philanthro resource to cost-effective work. The letter was dangerous as might dissuade donors from funding good work.

8/ Maybe a factor here is that Nicholls is a prof of social enterprise. I don't 100% know what that is, but sometimes it means 'social things that charge money' so as to be financially viable. They may not like bednets b/c the evidence is that charging for nets massively reduces

9/ usage and hence results - ie,. there's a trade-off between earned income and impact. (poverty-action.org/sites/default/…)
In fact, re #impact investing & all that, in every instance that I've examined, it turns out that charging for the product...

10/ reduces uptake and results (incl. solar lamps). I wrote in the FT about that: giving-evidence.com/2018/11/05/imp…

Various of you helped with this letter, so thanks again to you for your help with this bit of activism: just trying to keep people alive and healthy! 🤜🤛

@PaulGarnerWoof @rajpanjabi @GiveWell @AgainstMalaria @gatesfoundation @Effect_Altruism @JPAL @BillGates @poverty_action
You should know about this bit of pro-bednet fact-correcting in The Economist!

@AvivaUK You see, Aviva, I am not afraid of fights in public. Aviva's treatment of us as customers has been appalling, and its recent letter to us derisory and insulting. You'll do well to give us a decent settlement - and soon.