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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."
The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources. I would hope this component would be very high on the list of any type of aid when addressing suffering and helping to stop the perpetuation of suffering.
I find it hard to believe that people criticize this. What have you done for those people there is what I would like to know? As 'the' human race we should be ashamed that people still die of malaria. If Gates can fix that then Gates is a hero in my book. I don't like his software company and I might not even like the person Gates, but come on people... this is just awesome.
Once you can shoot down mosquitos with lasers you might not need a vaccine for malaria. Like this we should find technological solutions that make vaccines unnecessary. I am wondering why Bill Gates is funding both initiatives.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If they come up with a vaccine that cures curmudgeonly-pointless-cynicism, I hope you'll be one of the first in line.
Sorry about the mess.
I think $1149 worth of primary care medicine or even plain old sanitation in underdeveloped places could save a hell of a lot more lives than that.
Totally. You should go tell all the children that would benefit from these vaccinations that you don't support this cause because Microsoft was totally lame for requiring Internet Explorer be installed to properly run Windows.
Fucking OSS people. Seriously, go choke on your beard.
Similes are like metaphors
Actually more people living longer means more people will need drugs for their longer lifespan.
If "everyone" keels over during infancy there's not much of a window to sell them drugs. Get families that pop out 10+ kids and get them all living to be geriatric and you've got a pharmaceutical gold mine.
Wow, these comments. suck.
/. are talking about patents, Microsoft money, etc.
Bill Gates just gave a HUGE amount of money to tackeling diseases that kill thousands of people per year. Not potential people or some statistics on a population map, but alive, breathing, suffering people. This could potentially save thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of lives. And he just gave this ridiculous amount of money away to this end. And the people on
This is a good, noble, and amazing act. Show some goddamn respect. What have you done that could change the lives of that many people? Acknowledge a noble and selfless act...the world would be a much better place if more people not only committed them, but acknowledged them and derive inspiration from them.
And are you critisizing them for that? What point are you trying to make? Oh, the under-privileged schools are going to be locked into Microsoft's Business Model? Well if they couldn't afford it before than they won't be able to afford it later - so they're in the same spot as they did when they began. On the other hand - they have free proprietary commonly used software for education for as long as its not obsolete. Considering Microsoft Office is THE office productivity package a majority of the world uses, it makes sense that they would want to educate people in its usage.
Now, I know you'll say that they are just doing it to keep their products in the marketshare; and thats true. But that is just good business practice, it isn't underhanded or dirty in anyway. If the free alternatives want to make some ground, maybe they should be promoting their packages in under-privileged schools.
Now, I have been saying for a long time that if Gates just took all his money and spent it wisely he alone could get rid of ONE disease that plagues the Earth, like Malaria. I'm glad to see these initiatives taking place.
Most aren't. But transporting them to the middle of nowhere along with people to properly administer them is.
You forget to add in the R&D used to create said drug, the FDA Fees and costs to get the drug tested and approved. Now add in the Liability costs when shit happens to %.001 of the people taking the drug and are sued into oblivion by the likes of John Edwards and so on.
The real cost of a vaccine is probably closer to $200 per dose than the actual $1 cost to manufacture it.
Now, if you're suggesting we stop R&D, FDA approval process and torts against the vaccine manufacturer then we might be closer to getting your fictional $1/dose vaccine.
It just isn't as simple as you suggest.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Warren Buffett donated $30 billion dollars to the B&M Gates Foundation. So it's entirely possible that none of this money is Bill's.*
*Okay, not is not. B&M were getting the $30B in 5% annual increments starting in either 2006 or 2007, but can't we pretend for the sake of hundreds of thousands of live?
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.)
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?
Because the current US healthcare system is a form of feudalism, where the serfs (workers with at least one family member not in perfect health) find it hard or impossible to leave the protection of their lords (large companies). This lack of mobility and reduced freedom of choice drives down prevailing wages in the job market, and it makes it much harder for potential competitors to start new small companies.
Few have benefited from this situation more than Mr. Gates, so I doubt that he's going to make any big moves to change the status quo.
Saving lives is always a good thing, don't get me wrong. But I often wonder if 10 billion spent on infrastructure like irrigation, factories, schools, etc.. would save more lives in the long run for impoverished countries.
On one hand, if every 3rd person was dropping dead of an easily preventable disease in a country, it certainly wouldn't be a very stable society. Say you built schools, irrigation, factories, and then every other worker involved in them was sick. It just wouldn't work. The farms wouldn't produce, The factories would shut down, people would fear going to school and contracting something, etc..
On the other hand, education and birth control, infrastructure, etc.. will eventually allow a people to pull themselves up. If ever day is a constant struggle for survival, thinking long term (like building a road) is low on their priority list, and it just won't ever get done.
Perhaps there needs to be some regulation in place that dictates that aid must be spent equally between pure life saving and development of the interior? In the last decade, there have been several good books talking about why pure food aid in Africa, for instance, isn't very beneficial. It is only after seeing the results of multiple decades of food aid, that people are beginning to question pure life saving aid.
Morally, it is hard to say "some must die so that less may die next year", but it certainly doesn't seem like situations in impoverished countries are getting any better with the current model of aid.
No, the Hispanic immigrants seem to be breeding enough to keep this problem at bay in the US.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to use the phrase "Big Pharma" . At least you didn't go off on the whole autism spiel. I'm getting really tired of hearing that one.
why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?
Health care expenditures in the United States on health care surpassed $2.2 trillion in 2007. $10B would only last 40 hours.
Have the stars finally aligned? There's two 4 UID'rs and two 5 digit UID'rs who've posted within one good scroll wheel spin on this thread. Never thought I'd see the day when THAT happened... who knew discussing reproduction control would bring you tentacled, frothy horrors out of the ravening deeps!
think I'm going to go run for the hills. If a 3 digit UID surfaces, Nyarlathotep can't be too far behind...
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I knew this comment would appear.
You are disgusting. Does your irrational hate for Microsoft have no boundaries whatsoever?
If you are like 90% of people, you _would not be using a computer_ were it not for Microsoft.
But lets set Microsoft and software aside.
I encourage you to head to some disease infested rathole, pre-vaccination, and when people working with funds and medicine provided by the Gates foundation offer to give you an injection that gives you an order of magnitude improvement in survival over your ancestors and everyone in your peer group... I expect you to show them your printed out slashdot comment, [no doubt printed by a printer that Microsoft had some small role in bringing to market]... ...and I expect you to refuse the vaccine because you have principles that are beyond reproach.
I expect you to provide an eloquent lecture to the doctors [who will haved moved on to treating other people -- ones worth saving], extolling the evil of the foundation that makes it financially possible for them to help poverty stricken people without worrying about how _they_ are going to eat.
Before heading over, why don't you post it here? Why don't you explain for all of our benefit how Bill Gates created the patent system, and without it, free medicine would have invented itself, and subsequently sprouted wings and flown across the ocean to where it is needed; where doctors would materialize out of nothing riding in on glorious unicorns with silver manes, and then be well fed enough on all of the abundant free food in africa to gleefully risk their own lives to administer said drugs to the people that without such treatment would continue dying in mountainous heaps of human suffering.
I'm all ears, hot shot.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"Big Pharma" doesn't exist except in people's imaginations. What exists is a bunch of competing companies, not some uniform group out to screw the rest of us.
Whatever company comes up with the pill that removes all disease from people will make that company billions of dollars. Every other pharmaceutical company will go out of business? Would you really worry about that if you were going to make billions of dollars?
Qxe4
Did I say a word about stopping R&D? Hell no.
I said that bulk of the money goes to marketing instead of R&D. That, and in the case of US, rampant legal costs.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It seems, contrary to what many thought, that as people get better off they have less kids. For a long time population catastrophe was predicted to happen worst and first in industrial nations. They more or less extrapolated from bacteria saying "The better the conditions for the individual, the more they reproduce, and thus the faster you use up resources and hit a wall."
Well turns out humans are more complex. The birth rate in wealthy nations gets very low, sometimes negative. Seems the more healthy and well off we are, the less kids we have. There are all kinds of reasons as to why that might be the case, doesn't really matter. What matters is that it is the case.
So, that means that part of solving over population is working to improve quality of life. Being disease free sure as hell goes a long way in that.
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.
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Why did you bring up Microsoft? The comment that you are replying to has nothing to do with Microsoft. It has to do with the B&MGF's policy of requiring countries that benefit from their 'altruism' to sign IP treaties with the USA that prevent local production of the vaccines in question. Over the course of a decade, their 'donations' reduce the total amount of vaccines that will reach the people in the countries in question. Free vaccine now, but only if you make sure that the local company that could produce it for $1 never starts so when the donated vaccines run out you have to buy it for $200 from a US company. Sounds altruistic...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Big Pharma will love it. Bill buys $10bn of vaccines from them. They get the money. Then, he gives the vaccines to people in other countries on the condition that their government signs a treaty with the USA to enforce patents, like the ones on the vaccines. When the vaccines run out, the people in these countries start demanding that their government keeps supplying them. Unfortunately, they've just signed a treaty that prevents them from producing them locally, so now they have to go to Big Pharma and buy them. What's not to like?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If his $10 billion buys way less thanks to TRIPS and/or ACTA.
A few other good causes : Invest money into the pharmaceutical industries in countries like Brazil that have shown their willingness to break intellectual property treaties when people's lives are at stake. A cheaper and more charitable approach might be endowing biotechnology professorships with this stated goal at the best medical schools in these countries. A more political approach might be lobbying the European Union to pass legislation saying that generic drug manufacturers may violate patents for exported drugs to third world countries when the number of lives saved would be significant. Just oppose ACTA and/or try to roll back TRIPS --- ACTA will kill people.
I suggest that you read about the history of the fight against AIDS. If Brazil had not stood up against the U.S. and said "We will make anti-retrovirals ourselves if you don't sell them at a fraction of the cost", then incredible numbers of Brazilians would have died, and millions more would have died in other developing countries that currently benefit from Brazil's hard nose negotiation.
p.s. I do think all the people criticizing how he earned his money are being disingenuous. Gate's only sins are : robbing other rich people of their smart employees, selling poor quality software, and lobbying for bad copyright laws. Do you even want to think about what Exxon does with your gas money? Federal government with your tax money? (Iraq) etc. You don't see Dick Channey out running charity organizations.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Theres also the fact that while Americans whine and moan and bitch about 'how bad it is', we have no idea what its like to live in truely bad places.
When you go somewhere and see the population living in lean-to's, drinking water from the same tiny little water hole that the animals (and some people) deficate in, pure black and often foamy because the rare times that water makes it down the river its filled with run off from farms a thousand miles away and all the pesticides and fertilizers that go with that. THEN you see how bad it can be.
1200 doesn't buy anything useful as far as health care in America because everyone here can get that level of care fairly easy with all the government programs we already have or the fact that regardless of how bad our 'recession' is, we still can find money for this stuff.
1200 in Ethiopia still may only buy the basics, but going from absolutely 0 health care in a horrible environment to even the most basic level of vaccination its infinitely better than what they have. Its unimaginable the amount of difference that money can make.
I saw it first hand when I was very young (4 or 5 years old) and while that may have tainted my view of it, even today I think back and its hard to visualize the difference that what is such a small amount of money to us does for someone with nothing to start with.
And if you want to be selfish about it, think about how much a man or woman with a child about to die of something trivial will do for you after you save their childs life. I can't think of a way to get better allies than to save someones life.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If you could give them the experience of working 50+ hours a week to come home to a screaming brat, and have your money earned already spent before you even get it, just to take care of the child, the population growth would fall real fast.
For the problem of population growth in general, that's obviously nonsense. For the population to grow, people must be having on average more than 2 children, and guess what that means? Barring twins the first time out, they already have a kid and thus know exactly what kind of burden it is! So what exactly are you planning on teaching them?
For teen pregnancy, which isn't an issue of population growth but still, this is still not going to help. The problem has never been that teens want children, or don't know they don't want children, to any significant extent. The problem is that teens want to fuck. And you can't educate people out of their instinctual, hormonal urges.
The only thing teaching them about the burden of parenthood can accomplish is to make teenagers more likely to use proper birth control. But that's not "abstinence education" then is it?
The enemies of Democracy are
I can't help but feel that a lot of the Gates Foundation's efforts are misguided feel good fixes.
"Save the children" rather than fixing some of the underlying problems. For example, Iodine deficiency is perhaps the most cost effective human capital fix there is. Yet the Gates foundation has only given a few million to that cause as far as I can tell. Vaccines are sexy, saving children is sexy, makes your altruism feel good. Iodine in salt - not so sexy, no discernible results for 20+ years, no great feel good effect.
Oh awesome - Nikolas Kristof wrote about it : here
Unfortunately, the most cost-effective aid interventions tend to be the kind that are incremental and save only a small proportion of lives—and are thus least satisfying to the giver. For instance, my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I have recently published a new book, Half the Sky, arguing that educating and empowering women is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. In the book we call on the U.S. government to adopt a program to help poor countries iodize their salt. Right now, about one-third of families in poor countries don't get enough iodine, and the result is not so much goiters as diminished intellectual capacity. Iodine is essential to brain formation for a fetus in the first trimester, and if a mother lacks iodine her child may end up mentally retarded. More commonly, children in such areas lose 10 to 15 IQ points, with girls particularly affected for reasons that aren't fully understood. This is a lifelong intelligence deficit and a significant burden on poor countries, and it can be resolved very cheaply; iodizing salt costs a couple of pennies per person per year.
Studies have suggested that iodizing salt brings real economic returns of nine times the cost—and yet we don't do it. The reason is, I think, that the results are statistical, not visible. You can never look at a child afterwards and say, "This girl would have been retarded if it weren't for iodized salt." All you can do is note that retardation rates fall and that, a decade later, school performance improves significantly.
Guys/ Gals, GET THIS:
Development of countries is fucking hard! NOBODY knows a solution so far!
So, it is useless to go on and on about how he should spend his money on X, Y or Z "because that will solve all problems". No, it WON'T! It might improve something or it might not.
There are hundreds of thousands of people working in the development sector trying to find a solution to help the poorer world develop. And many things have been tried and will be tried, but it is like democracy: there is no clear way how to develop it in a country, so that it works long term. Lots of ideas around, but no proven solution anywhere.
Therefore people like Gates giving his money (however wrong you think he got it) to help in a certain way (small or big) is GOOD. Or would you prefer him to keep it in his bank account and accumulate stupidly high interest each year? He should spend it as much as he can to spread it around.
</rant>