Gates Foundation Plans To Invest $10B Into Vaccines

Endloser writes "Bill Gates is going to invest $10 billion to provide vaccines to people worldwide. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that vaccines are the way to a better future for the world. So they have decided to make 'the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause.' This 10-year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives."

Comments

And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

It's good that a portion of his ill-gotten gains will save some lives, but it's tragic that so many more people are dying because access to medicine is blocked by the TRIPS agreement that Gates and friends pushed through.

This donation mustn't be let overshadow the harm. If it's let, then more such harm will be accepted in the future.

(ACTA is the modern TRIPS. We can still stop it.)

Re:Birth Control

[Sycraft-fu]

"Why do you think most of the stuff we eat, comes from poor countries?"

What are you on about? The US is by far the biggest produce of foodstuffs in the world. They've been a net exporter for food for a long time. I know it is fashionable in some circles to think everything comes from exploited people elsewhere but that simply isn't the case. Food comes from high tech, efficient, agriculture. The US produces mass amounts.

For that matter, the much predicted starvation catastrophe scenario in the developing countries was averted by an American scientist, Norman Borlaug, by introducing American methods and plant strains from other parts of the world, including America.

You also might want to do a bit more learning about where other resources come from. Africa certainly produces some, but there are many more that isn't the case. For example copper, very important to modern society, is dominated by Chile, followed by the US, Peru, China, and Australia. Then of course there's the current grad daddy, oil, which is dominated by the Middle East, but also Russia, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, and so on.

Your conceptions and reality do not seem to match up.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft didn't put the patent laws into place, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did. What, you thought those medicines were free? No, they came with the requirement that your country signs a trade treaty with the USA, bringing your patent system into line with theirs. You get the vaccines now, but you've just made it much harder to develop a native information economy, and you've probably just bought another decade or two of poverty for the majority of the population. Yay for altruism.