Today, @coeff_giving is launching the Strep A Vaccine Fund, a multi-donor initiative to accelerate vaccine development against one of the world's most neglected infectious diseases relative to its scale. Strep A kills ~639,000 people a year. There is no vaccine. I think that can change 🧵

Meet the MalVax Alliance! We unite researchers, developers, funders, policymakers & implementers to advance malaria vaccines for the communities who need them most. 🔗 malvax.org 📩 Newsletter: mailchi.mp/malvax/stay-conne… #EndMalaria #GlobalHealth #MalVaxAlliance

News! @coeff_giving is significantly accelerating our global health and wellbeing giving in 2026-27! Increasing our @GiveWell support to $1B was the first step. Today we're taking another: Launchpad Funds, an RFP to seed new funds to take on big, underfunded problems in GHW. 🧵

I’m really excited about this: we’re increasing our support for @givewell recs this year from $175M to $1B to help pave the way for an expected surge in funding from others. coefficientgiving.org/resear… That’s nearly as much as we’ve given based on GiveWell's recs over the last decade+; we think that funding to date has saved ~100,000 lives. There’s a ton of uncertainty about what the future will bring, but IMO the case for giving ambitiously today looks unusually strong. Let’s get to work!

Our team recently united for our Annual Meeting to celebrate milestones & define our strategic plan for next year. The system isn't built for caregivers–we're working to rewrite that narrative & dismantle the motherhood penalty. Join us! 👉 ow.ly/WZwg50Zq41t

📣Exciting announcement 📣 The First Global Strep A Vaccine Conference Call for abstracts will open soon! 🌏Venue update: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, first week of February 2027 📝Abstract submissions open 30 July 2026. #GSAVConference2027 @coeff_giving Read the full announcement here ⬇️ lnkd.in/eiu95fXm

Some bittersweet news to announce today: I recently left @IFP to join @coeff_giving as Managing Director of Public Policy, where I'm building a new US AI policy team, overseeing the Abundance and Growth Fund alongside @mattsclancy, and managing CG's government affairs work. Building IFP has been the defining professional project of my life, and this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. In just four and a half years, our team became, pound-for-pound, the most effective think tank in DC. I feel insanely proud of the work we’ve done and the incredible team we’ve assembled. I sometimes joke that when @alecstapp and I launched IFP, we felt like two kids in a trench coat pretending to be a think tank. And now we're a proper institution! But it feels possible to step back now because they've hit escape velocity. The talent density at IFP is bonkers. And I have complete confidence they'll keep racking up counterfactual policy wins with Alec at the helm and our superstar directors. I'm staying on the IFP board and staying in DC. In some sense the new role is a continuation of the old one. All of IFP's policy issues are reflected in CG's portfolio, but now I'm working at a new layer of the stack. So why leave? Because AI is hitting Washington like a tsunami, and DC is still radically underprepared. I hold a lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems very plausible that the next 2–10 years will bring the fastest technological upheaval we've ever had to navigate. The new team I’m leading is a bet on how to prepare: proactively scanning the horizon, identifying gaps in the policy ecosystem, headhunting founders, and launching new organizations, while strengthening the democratic institutions that will have to steer through the transition to powerful AI systems. I've written an essay laying out the larger vision here: calebwatney.substack.com/p/a… There is no master plan or silver bullet here. I suspect getting AI "right" is going to feel more like a chaotic, iterative process of institutions trying to make better decisions over time as the facts change underneath them. As John von Neumann wrote in 1955 about mastering an earlier technological revolution: “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.” Each of the small, correct decisions ahead will look small only in the sweep of the full historical picture. Up close, every one of them will require heroic levels of effort and coordination. Coefficient Giving is scaling rapidly to meet the moment, part of what Nan Ransohoff has called the “third wave of American philanthropy”, potentially large enough to fund thousands of new projects and organizations. The binding constraint is unlikely to be money. It will be people: grantmakers and policy entrepreneurs and others with the judgment to make a long sequence of small, correct decisions, and the ambition to build the institutions we wish we had. I'm hiring a team of exactly those people, starting with generalist grant makers and a chief of staff. If you share this vision, please apply! And if you are building something that we’ll need in the years ahead, reach out. jobs.ashbyhq.com/coefficient…

I've spent my career working on vaccines, and until I joined @coeff_giving, I'd never heard Strep A mentioned as a global health priority. The more I looked, the harder it was to understand why a disease killing 630,000+ people a year was so neglected.  Across 200+ causes @coeff_giving has assessed over the last decade, we've rarely seen anything this neglected relative to the burden (even compared to malaria and HIV, which kill similar numbers of people each year). Grateful to our partners behind @coeff_giving’s work on Strep A, and to @ghn_news for the space to write about the fund: globalhealthnow.org/2026-06/…

Still reflecting on this incredibly empowering experience—deeply moved by the generosity of our @womeninmalaria community. Grateful to all participants and @EMBLEvents for the opportunity. Hope it helped spark belonging and shape your journey. Image: WiM workshop at #EMBLMalaria

Guys, how do you invent a vaccine? Or wilder, how do you invent a vaccine during your PhD?! In a new episode of Hard Drugs, we talked to someone who did just that: @Kat_a_Collins! A single malaria parasite that reaches your liver is enough to cause an infection. Worse, malaria has a complicated lifecycle with multiple stages, during which it changes shape and switches its surface proteins. And it’s co-evolved with humans for thousands of years, learning to evade and misdirect our immune system. That’s why it’s been so much harder to develop vaccines against than viruses or bacteria. But not impossible! In this episode, @JacobTref and I are joined by Katharine Collins, who co-invented the second malaria vaccine, R21, during her PhD at the Jenner Institute in Oxford! After reading the expired patent of the first malaria vaccine (RTS,S), she stripped out the excess Hepatitis B surface antigen that RTS,S, leaving a particle with a much higher proportion of malaria antigen, used many newer processes, and paired it with a cheaper, more scalable adjuvant. The result is a vaccine that’s around a third of the price, easier to manufacture at scale, and may be more durable as well. It also means a vaccine that can reach far more children and save far more lives. Efficiency and scale matter enormously in the real world. It’s probably our coolest episode ever. You will learn lots of secret, behind the scenes information about how innovation really works. We chat about all this and much more! Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 05:08 Our favourite parasites 10:12 How to invent a vaccine during your PhD 34:18 Why is it called the R21 vaccine? 37:32 Moving from the bench to hundreds of millions of doses 41:43 The vicious life cycle of malaria parasites 46:15 Malaria research IN MICE 53:03 The murderer in malaria research 55:51 Would you volunteer to get infected by malaria? 1:08:21 Why did the first malaria vaccine take so long? 1:18:26 Could we have had the vaccine sooner? 1:40:48 Vaccine versus vaccine: which one’s better? 1:46:53 If we did this again today, could we make better vaccines? 2:04:55 Conclusion and our reasons for pessimism and optimism

Today we're launching the Strep A Vaccine Fund: a new multi-donor initiative to accelerate vaccine development against one of the world's most neglected infectious diseases, relative to its scale 🧵

This initiative is great! If you are keen to learn about Strep A, prior attempts to make a vaccine, and why it's difficult, we published a short essay on it at @AsimovPress: press.asimov.com/articles/st…

Really proud of @Kat_a_Collins and team for this launch. This fund nails each point of our importance (~639k deaths/year), neglectedness (~$1/DALY of R&D, much less than malaria or HIV), and tractability (promising but stalled vaccine candidates) framework.