Voice of America article about RethinkHIV

At the U.N., a Free-for-All on Setting Global Goals

MAY 6, 2014

by Eduardo Porter

"There are, of course, better and worse ideas. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, who achieved renown by arguing that current efforts to cut carbon emissions to slow climate change cost too much and deliver too little, argues that many of the new targets also fail the test. He has been making the rounds among diplomats, showing them the results of cost-benefit analyses of some of the ideas on the table..."

COPENHAGEN – West Africa’s Ebola epidemic has dominated headlines for much of the last year. But, as devastating as that outbreak has been, its death toll of less than 20,000 people is dwarfed by that of preventable diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which together caused more than three million deaths in 2013, hitting the world’s poorest people the hardest. This need not be the case; indeed, addressing these diseases would be an extraordinarily good investment. 

The world faces many challenges, between the impacts of inflation and high-interest rates, the lingering impacts of the COVID pandemic, and geopolitical conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid all this, 2023 marks the halftime point for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—the sprawling list of 169 ambitions in which all global leaders have promised everything to everyone.