[...] More people did indeed receive anti-retroviral drugs than before, because the US government brokered a patent-protection deal with the Big Pharma companies. Surely this strategy has its costs. Should we count the number of people “saved” by the pro-patent approach against the number of people who might have been saved if the patents had simply been broken by the endangered countries? And who can quantify the damage done by narrowly moralizing public health campaigns? As long as the standard of performance begins with “better than nothing,” there will always be a semblance of progress even if nothing really changes. But it is difficult to celebrate the number of people “alive today” because of President Bush’s policies—which is Bono’s constant refrain—without asking whether more people might be alive if different priorities had prevailed. Or to put it another way: whenever a superpower trumpets the lives it has saved in one place, it is absolutely necessary to ask about the lives it has taken elsewhere.