Politics matters: a response to recent commentaries.

McCoy and Singh rightly comment on how extraordinary it is to need to spell out the political nature, actions and motivations underlying global health policy (1), which articulates where they (and we) are coming from. Yet without such commentators, it would be easy for the global health community today to forget how political and macro-economic decisions in the 1980s and 90s gave oxygen to the social determinants that undermined the health of populations, especially in low-income countries. These fuelled the diseases that are the focus of today’s global health partnerships; and some of the same organisations played leading roles in setting the global health agenda then, as today.