ALT But moral arguments don’t exist in an empirical vacuum. What sort of evidence was used by PEPFAR’s architects to make their moral case? In 2013, the U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Commission invited former director of the National Institutes of Health and Nobel-winning scientist Harold Varmus to give a lecture on diplomacy. Varmus interviewed some of the participants in the early PEPFAR planning meetings to better understand what kind of evidence mattered when deciding whether or not to go forward with the PEPFAR plan. Varmus wrote: all agree that two kinds of testimony helped to convince the president’s representatives that the program should go forward. First, the evidence from those who had worked in the field that antiretroviral drugs and preventive measures could be deployed effectively and at reasonable cost, even in very poor settings, like Uganda and Haiti. Second, perhaps even more powerful, the visual demonstrations of how the new drug regimens could restore health — several participan