Thank you all

You continue to save lives

People often ask me whether writing a substack is lucrative. Having just completed my tax return for 2024-25 I discovered that writing 52 substacks earned me £6426.06 that year. That money it taxable, of course, so I can’t give up the my day job just yet…

As many of you will know, I donate every penny from this substack to the excellent Against Malaria Foundation. Malaria kills around 600,000 people each year, mostly children under 5. AMF buys long-lasting insecticidal nets, which, when draped over a bed keep people safe from malaria-carrying mosquitos while they sleep. The charity is consistently rated one of the best charities in the world, in terms of saving the most lives per £ spent, and for being one of the best charities at evaluating the effectiveness of what they do.

In 2024-25 the nets you funded were sent to Guinea and to the Democratic Republic of Congo. These are profoundly poor countries. While half the people in the world live on less than $10 a day, 99% of people in the DRC survive on less than this. (We have no data for Guinea). In countries like these, most people are poor enough that they cannot afford to buy nets themselves.

Not every net will save a life, of course. Many people would not get bitten, or would recover from malaria. The best estimates are that for every $5500 AMF receive, a life is saved. That means that my subscribers, collectively, saved a little over one and half lives in that tax year. Even if it doesn’t kill you, malaria is deeply unpleasant. So as well as saving lives, you have also reduced suffering of many more people.

Thank you all.