As I understand the linked page, it’s mostly about retroactive rather than prospective observational studies, and usually for individual rather than population-level interventions. A plan to initiate mass bednet distribution on a national scale is pretty substantially different from that, and doesn’t suffer from the same kind of confounding.
Of course it’s mathematically possible that the data is so noisy relative to the effect size of the supposedly most cost-effective global health intervention out there, that we shouldn’t expect the impact of the intervention to show up. But, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone at GiveWell actually did the relevant calculation to check whether this was the case for bednet distributions.
As I understand the linked page, it’s mostly about retroactive rather than prospective observational studies, and usually for individual rather than population-level interventions. A plan to initiate mass bednet distribution on a national scale is pretty substantially different from that, and doesn’t suffer from the same kind of confounding.
Of course it’s mathematically possible that the data is so noisy relative to the effect size of the supposedly most cost-effective global health intervention out there, that we shouldn’t expect the impact of the intervention to show up. But, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone at GiveWell actually did the relevant calculation to check whether this was the case for bednet distributions.