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global health

concept · in 48 videos (2011–2026)

Health of populations worldwide, focused on preventable disease and the gap between rich and poor countries. John follows it through Save the Children and Partners In Health, from treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis to strengthening fragile health systems in Sierra Leone. He argues it should mean a shared worldwide effort, and says cuts like those to USAID make supporting global health charities more important than ever.

Videos by year: 2011: 1 · 2014: 10 · 2016: 3 · 2017: 3 · 2018: 5 · 2019: 1 · 2020: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2023: 5 · 2024: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2026: 3

Also known as: global health and poverty, health in poor countries, preventable disease

Threads

Also named in the threads: John's visit to rural health care in Ethiopia with the Gates Foundation (2014) · P4A 2014 edition · Partners In Health's comprehensive TB care project in Lesotho (search, treat, prevent), backed by Keats & Co. (2024) · P4A 2026 edition

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

tuberculosis (22) · Partners In Health (17) · malaria (8) · child mortality (11) · extreme poverty (7) · United States Congress (8) · progress (6) · health equity (5) · Save the Children (7) · Sierra Leone (10)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2011

  • 2011-10-26 · 7,000,000,000 People — Hank: Good news, per Hank: birth rates are down to 2.5 babies per woman, near replacement; contraception use is up dramatically; disease and poverty rates are lower; education is higher. — 00:02:11

2014

  • 2014-01-21 · Are Poor Countries Doomed? — John says malaria, measles and TB have all declined dramatically, and healthier kids go to school more and later work more than if chronically ill or disabled. — 00:02:09
  • 2014-07-15 · Exciting Announcements and Mosquito-Borne Illnesses — John says East Africa has dramatically improved health care and reduced infant mortality over the last twenty years; he is going to see this and how much work remains and where to help. — 00:02:21
  • 2014-08-12 · EBOLA! (...meningitis) — John thinks people are obsessed with Ebola because it is novel and very fatal, but also because diseases endemic to the developing world seem Other. (hedged) — 00:02:28
  • 2014-09-09 · Bill Gates and John Green Discuss Global Health — Bill Gates: Gates says health is not the only thing but the central thing a country must get right, or it cannot keep its children alive and support itself. (hedged) — 00:02:09
  • 2014-09-09 · Going to College (in Ethiopia) — John says the lesson of twenty years of global health is that children who needn't die can grow up and end up studying in that library. — 00:03:49
  • 2014-09-29 · Bill Gates and John Green Discuss Progress — Bill Gates: Gates calls Ethiopia's progress very exciting: health is an enabling piece, the country is pulling together, the system is well designed and donors look for missing tools. — 00:02:38
  • 2014-10-21 · Ebola: What IS Terrifying — John: If we enjoy globalization's benefits (Argentinian beef in Big Macs, West African chocolate in Hershey's Kisses, Kenyan roses, Bangladeshi clothes), we also live in a global health community. — 00:01:26
    • John hopes we learn that, with communicable diseases today, threats to the health of any humans are threats to the health of all humans. (hedged) — 00:03:23
  • 2014-11-19 · The Future of the Project for Awesome: Pizzamas Day 8 — announcement: John's summary: December 12-13 instead of 17-18; videos uploaded at noon Eastern on the 12th; watching, discussion, careful voting at projectforawesome.com; later money to voted charities, day-one money to global health and poverty charities. — 00:03:05
  • 2014-12-02 · What You Eat Of Those You Love — John says getting rehydration solution to the children who need it is, like everything in global health and poverty, fiendishly complicated, but complexity should not stop or intimidate us. (hedged) — 00:02:09
  • 2014-12-12 · NONSENSE: P4A 2014 - Partners in Health — Hank says that of all the ways not to make sense, people still lacking access to simple health care while we live at the peak of wealth in human history makes the least sense. — 00:00:26
    • Hank calls Ebola, antibiotic resistance and pneumonia world health problems from which no community is exempt. — 00:00:52

2016

2017

  • 2017-02-14 · Human Life Is Getting Better. Faster Than Ever Before. — John grants that Cold War foreign aid was often minimally effective at reducing poverty and improving health, but says it was designed to sway governments toward capitalism or communism; aid since 1990 has been better targeted, especially in health care, and he points to an OECD research overview. — video description
    • John relays the letter's point that most funding for global health initiatives comes from governments, not private individuals. — 00:01:18
    • John strongly believes foreign aid is in the US national interest: poverty and poor health raise conflict risk, and microbes ignore borders, so better health systems abroad lower everyone's disease risk. — 00:01:36
  • 2017-12-12 · 2017 is the Best? — John says it's possible that 2017 will be the second-to-last year (2016) any human ever gets polio; its end will be a huge global health victory won by millions of donors and volunteers. (hedged) — 00:00:26
  • 2017-12-15 · Why Big Solutions Fail — Hank says these health workers then help grow the economy, educate others, and keep their communities, and so the global community, healthier. — 00:02:16

2018

  • 2018-01-16 · My Hollywood Star, Brexit Pears, and Hank's Book: It's QUESTION TUESDAY — recommendation: John is now reading An Introduction to Global Health Delivery, quite different from Hank's book but also excellent. — 00:00:14
  • 2018-01-23 · On Emergencies — John recalls that the 2014 Ebola outbreak killed over 10,000 people and was called a global health crisis, a pandemic and an emergency. — 00:00:09
    • As long as the world fails to meet basic health-care needs, we will keep experiencing acute-on-chronic emergencies. — 00:02:16
  • 2018-08-21 · SYSTEMS!!!! — John: Investments that take a narrow view of health care, as if it were only tetanus shots, may not improve that situation much. (hedged) — 00:03:07
    • Learning about global health, John has seen again and again that fragile systems can improve and that a focus on health in the largest sense can improve every part of community life. — 00:03:26
  • 2018-12-07 · BABIES! The 2018 Project for Awesome is here… — John acknowledges that delivering health care in poor communities is exceptionally complex: not just food or medicine but sanitation, staffing, transportation and storage. — 00:02:02

Also named in: How Big a Problem is Mental Illness?

2019

2020

2021

  • 2021-02-02 · I Predicted the Pandemic (over and over and over again) — John: Following the letter, John says 'global health' has too long meant poor countries; infectious disease threatens everyone, and its greater threat to the marginalized means spending more, not less, fighting it. — 00:00:58
    • Global health should now mean a shared worldwide effort to improve the health of all humans by openly exchanging resources and expertise, which requires truly global cooperation. — 00:01:27
    • Post-pandemic global health needs a global alert system to identify new pathogens quickly, which works only if people can access health care in safe, sanitary, adequately staffed facilities. — 00:01:56
  • 2021-02-12 · Doing Better — Hank: Third and most accurate excuse: the systems are complicated and broken, with many stakeholders, and individuals have little power; Hank finds global health intimidating. — 00:01:50

2022

  • 2022-09-13 · A Million Things at Once — announcement: John says this progress has attracted new grants from big foundations so other Kono clinics can improve, the long-held hope that big global-health players would join. — 00:03:03
  • 2022-11-15 · 3 Years In: What Happened, Why, and What's Next — John says PIH has long fought for equity in health care: it proved multidrug-resistant tuberculosis treatable in poor communities and helped lead the push for antiretroviral therapy for people with HIV. — 00:04:22

2023

  • 2023-03-28 · My Tuberculosis Reading List — ask: John asks viewers to vote with global health in mind and to work to increase awareness of this profound injustice. — 00:03:24
  • 2023-07-11 · Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson — John warns that if global health keeps caring about infectious disease only when it affects rich countries, resistance will grow until an incurable strain causes a pandemic reaching rich countries. — 00:01:27
  • 2023-07-18 · Tuberculosis Fighters Have a Posse — John recounts a global health official telling him tuberculosis lacks a global constituency: illnesses with one get far more attention, and the problems we pay attention to tend to be the ones we solve. — 00:00:58
    • John says a disease having a constituency really means one that includes people from rich and powerful communities with access to the megaphones of the social internet. — 00:02:26
    • John says that for too long the fight against tuberculosis has lacked the global constituency it needs, but he hopes that is starting to change. (hedged) — 00:04:22
  • 2023-09-14 · Talking Tuberculosis, GeneXpert, J&J, and more with MY HEROES — John says the 40 years in which the global health community ignored TB were catastrophic, a catastrophe real people feel in their real lives. — 00:10:40
  • 2023-12-08 · Did Natural Cancer Treatments Save My Life? — Hank says most cancer cases on Earth, and an even greater majority of cancer deaths, occur outside high-income countries. — 00:04:47

2024

  • 2024-06-18 · The Tea — John says there are many examples of failing to keep up or follow through with commitments in global health and equity, and he wants to be conscious of that. — 00:02:26
    • John doesn't want to undermine the Sierra Leone maternal work, but PIH calls comprehensive TB care the next big thing in global health equity. — 00:05:21
  • 2024-09-27 · Is It 2010? IT'S A PARTS VIDEO — John says things in global health often move very slowly, but this moved reasonably quickly, and he wants to celebrate that. — 00:00:29
  • 2024-11-19 · Let's Talk about Money — John says global health funding in the world is flat or declining. — 00:04:39

2025

  • 2025-02-11 · What's at Stake — John says philanthropy cannot replace USAID's at-scale responses, but supporting global health charities is more important than ever. — 00:04:22
  • 2025-03-04 · The ANXIETY IS PALPABLE — John is anxious because he cares about human health, which he says is entering a bad period as the US especially, and also countries like the UK, dramatically pull back health investments. — 00:00:39
    • John says the book tries to tell a hopeful story about human health because he believes all true stories must be hopeful, and that there are reasons for hope, or at least reasons not to not feel hope. — 00:01:15
    • John says millions of lives are at risk and overall human health will get worse, which should stress us out. — 00:02:00
    • John says it sucks to watch humanity step back from one of the main points of being here: creating safety and security for each other, with access to healthcare and education. — 00:03:12
  • 2025-03-18 · ITS ALL HAPPENING — John says US government spending cuts mean, by one estimate, a probable 30% increase in drug-resistant tuberculosis in the next couple of years. (hedged) — 00:03:20
  • 2025-04-15 · Chatting with ... a U.S. Senator? — John cites an estimate that within two years, without restored funding, TB deaths will rise from 1.25 million to 2 million, up 750,000; TB is the deadliest infectious disease. (hedged) — 00:15:51
  • 2025-05-06 · Health CARE: Thoughts from Lima — John says PIH is good at providing blueprints governments can expand: mobile x-ray vans and backpack x-ray machines began as PIH-only projects and were taken up by the Ministry of Health. — 00:01:27
  • 2025-06-10 · 90,000,000 Lives for $20 — John says graphs of child mortality, TB and HIV deaths since 2000 all bring good news, but this progress will stop and reverse because of the US-led global pullback in health funding. — 00:00:00
    • John says the new match would gut the Global Fund, because the UK and EU are also cutting global health spending and will use it as an excuse to cut further. — 00:02:26
    • John says this catastrophe will be the greatest setback in human health in a generation. — 00:02:26
    • John says the US is not the only challenge: about 43% of the Global Fund's money comes from the UK and the EU, which are also pulling back on global health spending. — 00:04:22
  • …and 2 statements more in 2025 — all statements of 2025

Also named in: Fighting TB in Kids: A Discussion with Doctors without Borders

2026

  • 2026-02-13 · Project for Awesome 2026 Kickoff! — announcement: John says many TB fighters will be on Capitol Hill next month (March 2026) to talk to representatives about tuberculosis and global health funding. — 01:34:18
    • John says forces in power want people to forget they have a voice, but attention and money matter: TB and global health funding were preserved beyond anyone's expectations thanks to people standing up. — 01:34:47
    • Hank explains that the P4A raises money through a Tiltify campaign and other ways, and that half of it goes to Save the Children and Partners In Health, two extraordinarily effective global health organizations. — 06:01:35
  • 2026-03-03 · The Best Fan Mail I Ever Received — John filmed this video in advance because next week (week of 9 March 2026) he will be in Washington, D.C., lobbying on Capitol Hill for global health and tuberculosis funding with hundreds of TB fighters. — 00:00:00
  • 2026-03-10 · Is Hank Green Running for Congress? — John: Last week (early March 2026) John was on Capitol Hill with hundreds of TB fighters from the community, meeting over 250 Senate and congressional offices about global health and tuberculosis funding and research. — 00:00:00
    • John thinks Hank would be pretty good at the job: Congress could use a science communicator and global health advocate. — 00:02:07
    • TB fighter Tofu designed a brilliant website showing who your elected leaders are and whether they signed important dear colleague letters on global health and TB funding. — 00:05:02
    • John says US global health and tuberculosis funding are both relatively flat from the Biden years. — 00:05:31
    • If the Constitution works, John says, the US will keep funding TB and global health at about the same rate, which is a huge win. (hedged) — 00:05:31