Bill and Melinda Gates Grade the World’s Health
Global Health By
DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
SEPT. 18, 2017
Bill and Melinda Gates handed the world a report card last week, assessing its progress on
18 global health indicators: infant mortality, AIDS, vaccine use, smoking rates and so on.
ee generation" – all the rage six years ago — were "premature," he said, and he was "embarrassed" by claims
that malaria could be eliminated by 2015. that AIDS-fr
He was impressed." The new report’s weakness is that it cannot, for example, foretell how many more Ugandans would die of AIDS if American donations dropped 20 percent, in the way
that the Congressional Budget Office can calculate how many Americans will lose insurance under a particular health care bill.
Called "Goalkeepers," the report was a huge statistical effort, three years in the making, aimed
squarely at the world leaders gathering at the United Nations General Assembly this month.
"Goalkeepers" refers to a metric that the world ignores
but the Gateses do not: the targets periodically set by the United Nations, namely the 2000 Millennium Development Goals and the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.
