Roger Bate documents the ongoing controversy at the Global Fund over missing medicine and the trade of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. In particular, medicine to help fight against malaria have gone missing, stolen by the government's own procurement agency staff. The main culprit donor is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. He criticizes the Fund for poor oversight and trying to do too much. What awoken Western media is the financial theft from the Fund, which have irritated Swedish and German governments enough for them to suspend payments to the Fund, totaled over $250 million. But financial theft is only part of the problem.

The Fund is correct that the health systems in most locations are simply too weak to deliver the drugs, but it is not its job to train these people, he writes--such mission creep at the Fund is a major cause of its failure to prevent rampant corruption. He writes that it is time for a thorough investigation of drug theft to ensure that drugs are being used by those intended, rather than encouraging illegal parallel distribution systems, in both recipient nations and nations where products are diverted.