Jeffrey Sachs

Sachs maintains that Russia's invasion of Ukraine must be understood against the backdrop of a longstanding confrontation over NATO enlargement and that a negotiated Ukrainian neutrality could have prevented the war. His appearances, including on Russian media, prompted an open letter from numerous economists, including Ukrainians, accusing him of downplaying Ukrainian agency, repeating historical inaccuracies and shifting responsibility for Russian aggression towards the United States.

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Personally implicated

Two filmmakers and their company sued Jeffrey Sachs in California in 2025, claiming to have acquired rights linked to his book 'The End of Poverty' and incurred expenditure on a documentary that Sachs was supposed to narrate and present, before allegedly undermining the project's completion.

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Accused

At the beginning of the pandemic, Sachs had described the laboratory leak hypothesis as dangerous or irresponsible. After leading the Lancet COVID commission and examining links between EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he changed his position and stated that the possibility of a laboratory accident should be taken very seriously, also accusing certain American institutions of insufficient transparency.

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Directly implicated

A few days after the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, Sachs stated on Bloomberg that he would 'bet' on an American operation, possibly involving Poland. The presenter immediately interrupted him to ask what evidence supported the accusation. Sachs subsequently reiterated his suspicions and called for an international investigation.

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Personally implicated

Sachs has challenged the use of the term 'genocide' to describe the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, arguing that, in his view, the US government had not provided sufficient evidence for this designation and that a United Nations investigation was necessary. His position drew criticism from academics and human rights advocates in light of documented mass internment and other abuses.

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Personally implicated

The Millennium Villages Project, a flagship of Sachs's development strategy, was criticised by evaluation economists for its before-and-after comparisons, village selection and initial lack of a sufficiently robust control group to attribute observed improvements to the programme rather than national trends.

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Directly implicated

In 2021, Sachs dissolved the Lancet task force investigating the origins of COVID-19, citing certain members' links to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with insufficient transparency. Several members stated that they had been taken by surprise and accused Sachs of mismanagement; they subsequently continued their work separately.

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Direct responsibility

A Lancet paper on the Millennium Villages Project's results had to be corrected following criticism of its comparison of child mortality with national trends. Statements in the results and discussion were removed or amended, and the declaration concerning the funder's role was also corrected.

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Directly implicated

In 'The End of Poverty', Sachs argued that some countries remained trapped in poverty that could be overcome through massive, coordinated investment in health, agriculture, infrastructure and education. William Easterly and other economists criticised the approach as overly centralised, insufficiently attentive to institutions and local knowledge, and weakly supported by robust causal evaluations.

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Directly implicated

Jeffrey Sachs advised Russian reformers in the early 1990s, and his name became associated with the 'shock therapy' of rapid liberalisation and stabilisation. The social and economic collapse during Russia's transition subsequently fuelled lasting criticism that Western reforms had been excessively harsh, inadequately supported by institutions and socially devastating.

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