The best places to donate for COVID-19

TL;DR

We (SoGive) are receiving some queries about where to donate for donors wanting to respond to COVID-19. Here we give our answers, using our approach influenced by Effective Altruism.

Here’s the short answer: If mentioning just one organisation, our answer is:

• Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS)

If it’s suitable to provide a range of organisations (including those which are more indirectly relevant to COVID-19), our answers are:

• Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS)
• Biosecurity initiative at Centre for International Security and Cooperation
• Univursa Health
• Development Media International (DMI)
• CSER (Centre for Study of Existential Risk)

Note that this work has been performed as quickly as possible and our thinking may evolve.

0. Exec Summary

This report briefly considers reasons why COVID-19 may not be the best area to fund. Nonetheless, we are conscious that there are donors interested in this area, so we have generated our list using the following method.

“We” refers to SoGive, an organisation supporting donors to achieve high-impact giving.

Method: We generated a list of potential donation targets by performing a google search and reaching out to some of our contacts. This generated around 20 projects. We excluded promising COVID-19-relevant ideas which didn’t already have a shovel-ready organisation accepting funds for it, although there is an appendix which explores this area.

We then put the organisations into analytically relevant categories:

• Co-benefits: These organisations have the property that they may appeal to donors interested in COVID-19, and potentially have other benefits too
• Neglected: we believe that most COVID-19-related work has plenty of funding; anything which we consider to be neglected is included in this category
• Not funding-constrained: for these areas of work, there is a constraint that is likely to bite before our collective ability to fund (e.g. enough people with the right skills)
• Crowding out: We believe that philanthropy should only fund goods/services when another stakeholder (e.g. government or the private sector) wouldn’t fund it. When donors attempt to fund such work, they risk crowding out more suitable funders.
• No plan: Some organisations are receiving funds for work on COVID-19, but at the time of writing do not appear to have information on how the funds will be used

In our methodology, the first two categories were viewed more positively than the following three.

These organisations are listed in the table below.

At the moment, where we have sufficient analysis on the organisation (with positive conclusions!), and where it falls into a category which we assess positively, we treat it as one of our recommendations.

Our recommendations are tentative, because we have aimed to produce this quickly, rather than perfectly. As more information arises, our opinions may change.

Organisation	COVID-19-relevant?	Category?	Category assessment?	Assessment exists?
Johns Hopkins CHS	Directly relevant	Co-benefits	Positive	Yes
Biosecurity Initiative (CISAC)	Indirectly	Co-benefits	Positive	Yes
FHI	Indirectly	Co-benefits	Positive	Yes
CSER	Indirectly	Co-benefits	Positive	Yes
Wet markets (5 projects)	Directly (ish)	Co-benefits	Positive	No
DMI COVID-19 project	Directly relevant	Neglected	Positive	Yes
Univursa Health	Directly relevant	Neglected (& co-benefits)	Positive	Yes
WHO solidarity response fund	Directly relevant	Not funding constrained	Not recommended	No
Direct relief	Directly relevant	Not funding constrained	Not recommended	No
Unicef Fund for Coronavirus	Directly relevant	Not funding constrained	Not recommended	No
Italian GoFundMe	Directly relevant	Not funding constrained	Not recommended	No
Trussell Trust	Indirectly	Crowding Out	Not recommended	No
Southern Smoke	Indirectly	Crowding Out	Not recommended	No
First Book	Indirectly	Crowding Out	Not recommended	No
Global Giving COVID-19 Fund	Directly	No Plan	Not recommended	No

Note that “not recommended” does not necessarily mean that a donation to that area is bad, but rather that we believe that other possibilities likely outperform.

Johns Hopkins CHS is chosen as the single organisation to recommend (if only one is chosen) because of (a) the strong co-benefits and (b) the direct relevance to COVID-19.

1. Is COVID-19 a good area to fund?

The first question to ask is whether coronavirus is the right area to support if you want to donate. To assess this cause area using the standard three factor framework of Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness, a cursory assessment suggests the following for funding of coronavirus-related work as a whole:

Factor	Assessment
Impact/Scale	Huge
Tractability	Depends
Neglectedness	Not neglected. Mostly extremely crowded

Most areas of COVID-19 work are crowded enough that one may question whether it’s the best area to donate to.

Our experience of the charity sector at the time of the Global Financial Crisis of c2009 suggests that we expect the following to happen:

• The need for all the various (non-coronavirus-related) charitable projects won’t go away; if anything the need will increase
• Some charities will have lost money because of the impact of the markets on their investments
• Many funders will have lost money because of volatility in the financial markets, and will therefore less able to providing funding
• The remaining funding may be diverted to coronavirus-specific work

We tentatively believe that COVID-19 will be a popular (or at least somewhat popular) donation target. Below is our assessment of how COVID-19 performs on our checklist of “propensity to be popular with funders”

Factor that leads to popularity/overfunding	How COVID-19 performs
Highly visible/strong media exposure	✅✅✅✅
Sense of innocence of victims/beneficiaries	✅✅
Cuteness of victims/beneficiaries	❌
Victims/beneficiaries similar to donor (“that could be me”)	✅✅✅
Donors feel unaffected by the issue (e.g. issue arises at Christmas)	❌❌
Funding can go to something tangible, like a building	❌
Donors frequently receive an “ask” from a needy beneficiary	❌

As can be seen from this table, we predict donor interest in COVID-19, but not to the same extent as some other popular causes, such as the tsunami appeal of c2005 or guide dogs or lifeboats or homelessness, many of which would score similarly highly or more so on this chart.

However we nonetheless expect that COVID-19 will nonetheless attract substantial donor interest. And given that funding sources for other charitable activities will likely contract, it is likely that the smart money should go to something other than COVID-19.

In order to firm up our opinion on this, we would need to see a deeper analysis of the more effective donation opportunities highlighted here. This would include

1. Considerations around how much more funding (if any) they would receive as a result of elevated interest in COVID-19, and what this means for the marginal use of the next dollar donated (especially relevant for organisations which have already been assessed and recommended prior to the COVID-19 outbreak)
2. Further models of cost effectiveness to facilitate comparisons with other donation opportunities, to the extent that this is possible (especially relevant for new projects)

This document is geared towards those funders who wish to support COVID-19 despite these considerations.

2. Category 1: Co-benefits (Benefits for future pandemics and other co-benefits)

<<< SoGive opinion on this category: positive>>>

Organisations in this category:

• Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security
• a think tank at Johns Hopkins University which carries out research on biosecurity and maintains a COVID-19 resource centre
• Biosecurity initiative at Centre for International Security and Cooperation
• a research centre at Stanford that carries out policy research and industry outreach; has general relevance to pandemics
• Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)
• a research centre at the University of Cambridge, intended to study possible extinction-level threats, including pandemics
• Tackling wet markets (multiple orgs)
• The COVID-19 pandemic started at a wet market in Wuhan

Organisations which generally tackle pandemics are a good choice. Lots of work relating to general pandemics is also relevant to COVID-19 because of the possibility of a resurgence or second wave of the pandemic.

The organisations listed here have the property that they may appeal to donors interested in COVID-19, and potentially have other benefits too. For example the organisations may also do other high-impact work relating to existential risk, and donations to these organisations may funge with those high-impact areas of work, as well as potentially funding good work on pandemics.

The existence of co-benefits (e.g. relevance to future pandemics or other sources of existential risk) is important to our assessment of the work as positive for a donor, given that most work which is specific to COVID-19 is likely to already be highly crowded (rare exceptions noted in the section on neglected work).

Tackling wet markets has a clear link with COVID-19, since this is thought to be where the COVID-19 epidemic came from. The key outstanding questions are the extent to which this remains an issue given the recent Chinese ban on wet markets.

3. Category 2: Neglected work on coronavirus

<<< SoGive opinion on this category: positive>>>

We struggle to find any work on coronavirus which is neglected. The only category we know of is:

• Some work on COVID-19 in the developing world

Organisations in this category:

• Development Media International
• Project in Mozambique and Malawi (and possibly other countries) to promote handwashing and other relevant behaviours
• Univursa Health
• They are looking to build a diagnostic tool using algorithms and machine learning to rapidly identify possible outbreaks of COVID-19 within their borders, where those countries have limited capacity to do laboratory-based testing. There is a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

In our conversations with Development Media International (DMI) we understand that some COVID-19 related work is neglected, especially around things which are country-specific (e.g. vaccine development should work on all people; developing a radio spot that works in Burkina Faso is specific to Burkina Faso). At time of writing we have not been able to fully explore/verify this claim in general, and would welcome further feedback about the extent to which this applies.

We have included Univursa Health in the “neglected” category, but it could equally be included in the “co-benefits” category, since the mechanism could be used for detecting many other things.

4. Category 3: Not funding-constrained

<<<SoGive opinion: ultimate impact unclear, not recommended>>>

Examples of the sorts of work that is not funding-constrained

• Sending supplies such as personal protective or hygiene equipment to frontline workers
• Health education messaging in the developed world
• Research on vaccines and treatments

Organisations in this category

• WHO solidarity response fund: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/donate
• Send essential supplies such as personal protective equipment to frontline health workers
• Enable all countries to track and detect the disease by boosting laboratory capacity through training and equipment.
• Ensure health workers and communities everywhere have access to the latest science-based information to protect themselves, prevent infection and care for those in need.
• Accelerate efforts to fast-track the discovery and development of lifesaving vaccines, diagnostics and treatments
• Direct relief: https://www.directrelief.org/emergency/coronavirus-outbreak/
• provide personal protective equipment and essential medical items to health workers responding to coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Unicef: https://www.unicef.org.uk/donate/coronavirus/
• personal protection for health workers; hygiene materials for thousands of schools, public health facilities and other public places; and support with health education messaging
• Italian ICU GoFundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/coronavirus-terapia-intensiva
• Funding ventilators and monitors etc for Ospedale San Raffaele di Milano
• Future of Humanity Institute https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/:
• FHI is a multidisciplinary research institute at Oxford University studying big picture questions for human civilization

For these items, there is a constraint that is likely to bite before our collective ability to fund. For example we will likely run out of ability to manufacture personal protective equipment such as masks before we run out of money to pay for them; we will hit the point of diminishing marginal returns on health education messaging in the developed world before developed world governments run out of funding for that messaging; we will run out of skilled people able to do high quality research on vaccines and treatments for coronavirus (or to provide peer review on it) before we hit a constraint on money to fund that work. This observation relates funding from all sources, not funding just from an individual donor, or even the sum of philanthropic funding.

So if you fund this sort of work, your money may well be notionally earmarked to that work, however this is likely to be illusory restrictedness (otherwise known as funging). The true impact of your donation is that the bodies who would in any case have funded that work now have more money to fund whatever they would have funded at the margin.

This may be no bad outcome at a time when governments and funding bodies everywhere are short of funds, however it’s hard for us to provide an assessment on the value of this, especially when some of those things (e.g. vaccine development) are currently being funded multilaterally by lots of different funders, so a full assessment of this question would need to consider who those funders are, and how impactful their use of funds would be at the margin.

Once the relevant stakeholders and their funding flows are clearly mapped, it may turn out that this funding is equivalent to paying extra tax to the government. Or it may be that extra funding is stored up which can then be used on funding pandemic vaccine research over the coming years. Given that this form of research has been prone to cycles of being underfunded and then overfunded, storing up funds which will only be disbursed over several years may still be a positive outcome, especially for an area like bio risk, which is a fairly high-impact cause area.

5. Category 4: Tackling a problem that risks crowding out other players

<<<SoGive opinion: not recommended>>>

Examples of types of work:

• doing work which may soon be done by the government, such as bailouts for restaurant staff or freelancers
• doing work which could be provided by the private sector, for example providing books to children

Organisations in this category:

• Trussell Trust: https://www.trusselltrust.org/
• Trussell Trust organises food banks in the UK; including emergency food because of coronavirus
• Southern Smoke Foundation https://southernsmoke.org/support/
• Help support those in the food and drink industry in crisis
• First book: https://firstbook.org/
• First book aims to deliver 6 million books to kids in light of school closures

Donating/philanthropy is a good idea for things that are neglected. If another body has incentives to provide certain goods or services, then it’s better if they do it. Bodies such as governments or for-profit companies are examples of other such bodies.

As an example, donating to a foundation which will help out freelance workers risks being unhelpful because the government may choose to provide a bailout package anyway, in which case your donation turned out to have minimal value.

We have tentatively included food banks in the UK in this category. This is based on the expectation that the UK government would have little incentive to allow people to starve because of the pandemic, and that it would be difficult to expect a volunteer-run food bank system to function effectively when members of the public are largely staying at home.

While we consider it likely that the UK government will take some action in this area, we are unclear on when this will happen, and how many people will suffer financial ruin before then.

6. Category 5: No plan: Organisations seeking funding but providing no plan of action for funds

<<<SoGive opinion: not recommended>>>

Example donation opportunities in this category:

• Global Giving fund: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/coronavirus-relief-fund/#menu
• We found no information whatsoever about how the money will be used

We are aware of some organisations who are currently conscious that people want to donate to support the COVID-19 crisis. In light of this they are providing donors the opportunity to donate to a fund to tackle this issue, but without specifying how the money will be used.

Those of a suspicious disposition may fear misappropriation. While this is possible, we think it more likely that the organisations in question simply want to give themselves more time to consider how best to respond to the crisis.

Nonetheless, we do not feel in a position to recommend a donation opportunity without any information about how the money will be used

Appendix: not shovel-ready philanthropy ideas

This review has focused on shovel-ready projects which can receive funds now.

In this appendix we list some other potential ideas for things to fund. These things might not currently exist, but could be brought about by one large funder or a group of medium-sized funders.

These ideas have not been carefully assessed at time of writing

• Prize to encourage creation and widespread adoption of contact tracing app
• Contact tracing involves identifying people who have been in contact with those who have tested positive for the infection; it has been used successfully in some jurisdictions
• A key challenge is making this work in a way which respects data privacy
• Success here requires both the creation of the app and widespread adoption
• Arguments against this prize are that we know of two groups already who are working on this
• Arguments in favour include the fact that if the prize includes an incentive for widespread adoption, this would support outcomes which are not yet guaranteed
• Prizes for further diagnostic tools
• We believe that diagnosis would deliver substantial value; specifically a mechanism which can help with diagnosis, albeit imperfectly, but operate automatically and at scale is a gap
• A major argument against this is crowdedness again. Billions of dollars are already being poured into this sort of work.
• Work on facemasks
• Facemasks are relatively cheap and simple
• They have at least some effectiveness in helping control the spread of disease
• Gaps that we see include understanding whether a simple mask which doesn’t meet the required standards still has some effectiveness, and could be used to alleviate the demand for masks that are needed in medical contexts
• Broad-spectrum antivirals
• Broad-spectrum antivirals are difficult: viruses are small, so targeting them is hard
• A vaccine or drug which would be (even partially) effective against a wide array of viral pathogens would substantially help to control pandemics such as the current COVID-19 pandemic
• Research on this area is not totally neglected (see e.g. Martinez et al 2015 or Jones et al 2020), however may be neglected relative to the scale of the impact that could be achieved by such work
• We are unclear on the extent to which research on this area has the potential to be appropriated for malicious purposes
• This has the benefit that it would help against a second, mutated wave of COVID-19 pandemic as well as future pandemics

Appendix: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS)

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) is a think tank at Johns Hopkins University which carries out research on biosecurity, and advocates for improved policy in the US and internationally.

Our recommendation of CHS is based largely on the recommendation by Founders Pledge, set out in their report on existential risk. Their recommendation of CHS reflects past successes such as its development of guidance for the US on a response to anthrax, smallpox, plague, and Ebola before the US government had any guidance or efforts on these issues.

The CHS is very active on COVID-19. For example, they are maintaining a coronavirus resource centre: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/

Appendix: Univursa Health

Univursa Health is a new startup developing a diagnostics tool.

The concept was developed by Freya Jephcott, a highly experienced field epidemiologist and medical anthropologist with field experience through her work with MSF and WHO and Emma Glennon, a leading infectious diseases modeller.

Univursa began when Freya, having just returned from an outbreak response in Ethiopia, gave a presentation on the challenges involved in identifying the causative agent of outbreaks, especially in resource-limited settings. Emma immediately recognised that she could build mathematical models of the processes being described and through them rapidly identify the causative agents of outbreaks.

They have since then started work on a diagnostic tool.

The tool can either:

• Take in inputs about symptoms and produce an estimated diagnosis
• Or where a diagnosis isn’t possible, at least indicate how to prioritise which diagnostic tools to use first

The tool has originally been developed for use on haemorrhagic conditions such as ebola. It takes in a set of symptoms called a “line list”.

The tool then uses an algorithm to turn this list of symptoms into a diagnosis. In our conversation with Univursa, we did not spend too much time on the algorithm, however our understanding of the algorithm is summarised below

• The algorithm takes in information about a number of different symptoms (say N symptoms)
• The values for each symptom for a given case could be considered as a position within an N-dimensional space
• The algorithm then considers where in that space the reading lies, and calculates the distance between the symptom-set considered for that particular input compared with the locations in N-dimensional space that are associated with a particular diagnosis, using a straightforward Euclidean distance metric
• The output is a probability associated with each possible diagnosis, from which an overall diagnosis can be inferred

The tool has been tested in a theoretical context. They have tested the tool on some past examples of “cryptic cases” where diagnosis has been difficult and the tool has typically been able to get it right within about 5 or so cases.

We are somewhat sceptical of these apparently positive findings. We worry that

• Apparent success based on the cases that have been chosen to be the most cryptic may not necessarily generalise to work in the field
• More generally, the fact that the work has not been tested in the field means that some risk remains to the project’s success

Having said that, the tool is intended to be used in a resource-constrained setting, e.g. in a developing world context where the most common approach may be to bring in foreign experts via organisations like MSF or the WHO. Experts who will now be in very short supply. This means it has to beat a very low bar in order to outperform.

And even if we don’t believe that it’s likely to outperform even this very low bar, the benefits are high enough that the opportunity seems worth exploring.

To assess this, we would like to quantify this in a model which considers the scale of the benefit, as measured in, e.g., lives saved that could be brought about as a result of this work, compared with the cost of implementing the work. This model has not been produced at time of writing.

The main tasks for Univursa to work on next are:

• Adapt the tool to shift from haemorrhagic conditions (like ebola) to respiratory (specifically COVID-19)
• Performing field tests

We understand from Univursa that other similar tools are either data collection tools to help with diagnosis, or analysis tools that could be used by someone with a relatively sophisticated grad school background, and likely not accessible for a typical district commissioner in sub-Saharan Africa.

We have explored with Univursa whether they have sought other sources of funding. Thus far, Univursa have been in touch with some for-profit investors, but are averse to this because of the risk of mission drift. We understand that they applied to Wellcome and did not receive funding, with no feedback provided.

Overall, we consider this a risky, but potentially high-impact piece of work, with potentially applicability not just to the COVID-19 outbreak to many other contexts, and operating in a context which is relatively neglected.

Appendix: Development Media International (DMI)

DMI is a GiveWell standout charity, and has been independently assessed by Impact Matters, and received a positive review from them.

We understand from our call with DMI on Wed 18th March 2020 that:

• There are some sub-Saharan African countries which have asked DMI to support them in their public health messaging, some of whom would not have that capacity without DMI’s support
• There is a shortage of funding for public health messaging work in sub-Saharan Africa
• DMI has a funding gap roughly of around a 6-figure sum in order to be able to perform this work

Assuming this is all correct, this would constitute a rare example of work which is:

1. Relatively well-evidenced
2. Neglected
3. Directly relevant to COVID-19

In terms of the evidence, we have the following:

• We have reviewed the existing evidence of DMI’s work based on a randomised control trial (RCT) performed in Burkina Faso which encouraged radio listeners to go to a health clinic if they were ill.
• The RCT was insufficiently powered to find an improvement in all-cause mortality; this is because of an improvement in baseline mortality.
• However it did convincingly find an improvement in visits to health centres
• DMI has also shared with us a high-level summary of the results of past work relating specifically to handwashing (see chart below)
• We have not at this stage been able to fully understand these results; in particular we do not understand the nature of the control group, the precise nature of the intervention, or whether any work was done to assess the ultimate impact on diarrhoea rates. We think that in order for this finding to be invalidated, it would be likely be because underlying baseline handwashing rates were improving independently of DMI’s work; we know of no reason why this should happen.
• More generally, we believe that there is often good reason to be cautious about assuming that a charity’s work is achieving results. However in the case of DMI, we think it reasonable for our default or “prior” assumption to be informed by the fact that advertising (probably) works, and therefore we should be more optimistic that DMI’s intervention probably works too.

We asked DMI whether they knew of existing models to link a certain increase in handwashing (say) with an impact on r or the reproduction number. They did not know of any such models, and we are also unaware of any. This makes it harder for us to build a cost-effectiveness model. At time of writing we do not have a cost-effectiveness model of DMI’s COVID-19-related work.

A counterargument against work in the development world is around whether flattening the curve is realistic in that context. Flattening the curve refers to controlling the spread of the pandemic so that it becomes manageable for the health system.

There have been question marks over whether it’s realistic to control the spread of the pandemic enough to stay within the capacity of the health systems in the developed world. It seems even more likely therefore that the health systems in the developing world will be overwhelmed, and therefore that any effort employed here will have no effect.

This concern seems all the more reasonable given that DMI’s past record on handwashing suggests that they can bring about an improvement, but it’s unclear whether they can bring about a drastic improvement (note that the context of a widespread, high-profile pandemic may invalidate our attempts to extrapolate from their past experience).

In discussion with DMI it became clear that the benefits go beyond lives saved from handwashing or (if applicable) social isolation. It includes, for example, tackling the risks of misinformation. For example in an environment with pre-existing ethnic tensions, rumours may spread suggesting that the virus was brought about by (e.g.) another racial group, which may exacerbate conflict risk, at a time when the world can least cope with large refugee camps or strains on health systems.

Our confidence in our tentative recommendation of DMI would be higher if we had the data and capacity to put together a model which reflects these factors.

Appendix: Biosecurity initiative at Centre for International Security and Cooperation

The Biosecurity Initiative at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) is a research centre at Stanford that carries out policy research and industry outreach to reduce the risk of natural and engineered pandemics

Our recommendation of the Biosecurity Initiative of CISAC is based largely on the recommendation by Founders Pledge, set out in their report on existential risk. Their recommendation reflects the fact that their in-house biosecurity experts David Relman and Megan Palmer are both thought leaders in their field.

Our currently cursory review of their work suggests that their work is not very focused on COVID-19.

Appendix: Future of Humanity Institute (FHI)

FHI is a multidisciplinary research institute at Oxford University studying big picture questions for human civilization.

FHI has been funded in the past by the Open Philanthropy Project. We are familiar with work performed by a number of the thought leaders at FHI. We understand that FHI’s work mostly has little direct relevance to COVID-19, but some of it is relevant to pandemics.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak we reviewed FHI and deprioritised it because it was our impression that funding was not a particular constraint for FHI. Therefore, based on our current impressions, we are keeping FHI in the “not funding-constrained” category. Otherwise, it would likely fit well in the “co-benefits” category, because it does plenty of other work relevant to pandemics, bio risk, and funding directed to FHI may well funge with/enable other high-impact work.

Appendix: CSER (Centre for Study of Existential Risk)

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is a research centre at the University of Cambridge, intended to study possible extinction-level threats

Our opinion that CSER is a high-impact donation target is supported by our view that (a) tackling existential risk a high-impact cause area (b) having this resource available in Cambridge is a solidly valuable thing. We understand that CSER’s work mostly has little direct relevance to COVID-19, but some of it is relevant to pandemics and that they are looking to expand this element of their team.

We believe that this may be a suitable choice for funders inspired to support pandemics as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

Appendix: Work on Wet markets

Tackling wet markets has a clear link with COVID-19, since this is thought to be where the COVID-19 epidemic came from. Furthermore, multiple epidemics (avian flu and SARS as well as COVID-19) are thought to have originated in wet markets, because keeping live animals there increases the risk of zoonotic transmission. Tackling this issue has a number of co-benefits, notably for animals, who, we understand, suffer considerably as a result of these markets. Putting this area of work into a category which we are positive may suggest that we are positive about funding this area of work. However further work would be needed before we can conclude this.

A rough model for the impact of work on wet markets considers:

1. The amount currently spent by governments and NGOs on this currently
2. The scale of the impact of wet markets in terms of epidemic risk
3. The scale of the impact of wet markets in terms of animal welfare
4. We would need a fuller review to know how much is currently spent on this topic, however roughly extrapolating from what we know of the landscape, our rough guess is that the amount spent globally is fairly low, maybe c.$10million (rough order of magnitude)
5. We know of three epidemics thought to originate from wet markets in the last 20 years. A more careful model would require more time than we have for this quick review, so let’s assume that the epidemic risk is captured by assuming that a pandemic of the scale of COVID-19 will occur once every hundred years as a result of wet markets. The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic is thought to be at least $1 trillion (source: UN). This suggests that it would be worthwhile to invest $10 billion of effort (i.e. c1000x more than the amount currently expended) to move from the historic level of risk to zero risk. (Note that, as set out below, we are probably no longer at the historic level of risk anyway)
6. To give some idea of the scale of suffering, we understand that there are 20,000 wildlife farms in China and also that there were 20,000 wet markets that China closed in February 2020. It is unclear how many animals would be on a farm or would come through a wet market per year, however if we assume that a moderately high estimate is 10,000 animals per farm, then this is c 200 million animals per farm. This is relatively small compared to the scale of industrial factory farming (e.g. c 60 billion factory farmed chickens). However, assuming that non-human animals are given sufficiently high moral weight, this scale is still sufficient to add a material amount of extra benefit to the work on wet markets.

While the above initial assessment sounds promising, we would need to further consider the following factors

1. whether most of the work that needs to be done has already been done, given that China has recently banned wet markets and 80% of people in Beijing are opposed to wildlife meat markets
2. it is reported that wet markets still persist, but to what extent is this the case?
3. might control measures may drive wet markets underground in a way that might not be net beneficial
4. might the ban spawn the creation of new wet markets in nearby countries
5. is this area of work likely to be crowded as a result of COVID-19
6. a full model of the impact of work on wet markets should consider what impact (if any) there will be on Chinese people’s nutrition as a result of the ban, as well as the animal welfare impact and the risk of epidemics.

We know of several organisations which we understand to be working on this:

• Wildlife Conservation Society
• Wildaid
• WWF
• EIA
• Traffic
• Flora and Fauna International

Appendix: Long list of COVID-19 related donation opportunities

A list of options

• Future of Humanity Institute (FHI)
• a multidisciplinary research institute at Oxford University studying big picture questions, includes a section on bio risks, including pandemics
• Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)
• a research centre at the University of Cambridge, intended to study possible extinction-level threats, including pandemics
• Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security
• a think tank at Johns Hopkins University which carries out research on biosecurity and maintains a COVID-19 resource centre
• Biosecurity initiative at Centre for International Security and Cooperation
• a research centre at Stanford that carries out policy research and industry outreach; has general relevance to pandemics
• Tackling wet markets (multiple orgs)
• Wildlife Conservation Society
• Wildaid
• WWF
• EIA
• Traffic
• Flora and Fauna International
• WHO solidarity response fund: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/donate
• Send essential supplies such as personal protective equipment to frontline health workers
• Enable all countries to track and detect the disease by boosting laboratory capacity through training and equipment.
• Ensure health workers and communities everywhere have access to the latest science-based information to protect themselves, prevent infection and care for those in need.
• Accelerate efforts to fast-track the discovery and development of lifesaving vaccines, diagnostics and treatments
• Direct relief: https://www.directrelief.org/emergency/coronavirus-outbreak/
• provide personal protective equipment and essential medical items to health workers responding to coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Unicef: https://www.unicef.org.uk/donate/coronavirus/
• personal protection for health workers; hygiene materials for thousands of schools, public health facilities and other public places; and support with health education messaging
• Global Giving fund: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/coronavirus-relief-fund/#menu
• We found no information whatsoever about how the money will be used
• Canadian Red Cross: https://donate.redcross.ca/page/55441/donate/1?locale=en-CA
• When we launch an appeal, donations made in response to it are used to help individuals and communities identified in the appeal recover from emergencies and disasters
• CDC foundation: https://www.cdcfoundation.org/
• This was listed as a coronavirus-relevant donation opportunity, however we have not found any coronavirus-relevant info on their webpage
• Southern Smoke Foundation https://southernsmoke.org/support/
• Help support those in the food and drink industry in crisis
• Italian ICU gofundme campaign https://www.gofundme.com/f/coronavirus-terapia-intensiva
• Funding ventilators and monitors etc for Ospedale San Raffaele di Milano
• First book: https://firstbook.org/
• First book aims to deliver 6 million books to kids in light of school closures
• Development Media International
• Project in Mozambique and Malawi (and possibly other countries) to promote handwashing and other relevant behaviours
• Univursa health
• They are looking to build a diagnostic support tool to help countries to rapidly identify possible outbreaks of COVID-19 within their borders, where those countries have limited capacity to do laboratory-based testing. There is a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.