Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. Unfortunately, the trend is going in the opposite direction.

If you ask yourself who is paying for pharmaceutical innovation today, the answer is that it's the more affluent populations paying for still-patented advanced medicines at the pharmacy, for comprehensive insurance coverage or for a national health system.

The Bank and the media continue to propagate the story that the global elite wishes to be told: that the number of poor has declined by 24 percent in those 15 years [1990-2005].

What is really nice about the Health Impact Fund is that it is a win-win, something that without much cost to anyone makes a lot of people better off.

The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.

In order to achieve something, in competition with the powerful and smartly wielded influence of corporations, we need to join forces and be as well-organized as they are. This does not come natural to us more intellectual types, as we tend to be averse to hierarchy and groupthink; we don't like to be part of anything like a disciplined and well-organized team or movement. But the alternative is to continue losing politically - which means continued failure to protect the world's poor, who are really bearing the brunt of our disorganization.

To improve global health, it's not enough just to have a really good new product and to obtain marketing approval. You still need to market the product and bring it to patients, follow up, create the infrastructure, and so on - the whole pipeline, the network. That's something that companies are extremely good at: organizing a whole pipeline in a cost-effective way.