Yeah, I'm genuinely curious as well. Malaria nets are cheap, well studied as highly effective, and directly prevent debilitating and life-threatening illness. We're talking about something that can fairly immediately save real existing lives, no hypotheticals or easy to conceive of major deleterious second order effects.

1) I prefer what I can verify, understand, and immediately experience to what I cannot.

2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if.

3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible.

EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.

If you are saying that a near guaranteed miniscule benefit to rich people outweighs a risky gift to desperately sthenuffering people, you know you are doing so little good that it may as well be zero.

A "near zero" contribution would in many cases be a major improvement to what ends up being a massive negative contribution.

Why the parenthesis around “saving lives”? You seem skeptical that actually contributing to saving lives is possible.