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

Birth Control

[markdavis]

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.

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

A population of old people supported by a few young workers isn't going to be particularly viable either. It's a balancing act.

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

Melinda Gates spoke to Charlie Rose about this. She says that the foundation analyzed this question carefully, and came to the conclusion that it is just far far easier for a population to lift itself up out of a cycle of poverty if it doesn't have to deal with disease (both personal and of family members) all the time. It's hard to get an education when you're taking care of a household of polio victims.

Re:Birth Control

[cptdondo]

The problem is actually worse.... The British found this out in India. Fix the disease and infant death through better medicine and clean water, without birth control and massive outreach and education, and people will continue to have 12 babies.

Before modern medicine only 2 or 3 might survive to adult hood. With good medicine, all 12 survive, and the result is mass starvation and poverty.

So I certainly hope that B & M are well aware of history and know that they will have to educate as well as heal.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.

Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.

Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea.
P
Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.

Re:Birth Control

[Jeng]

Birth control doesn't mean no kids, it means planned kids.

Then there is also the issue that Yemen is having, 50% of their population is under the age of 18.

Re:Birth Control

[mindbrane]

Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman a Yale uni online course speaks extensively to overpopulation. In the context of this thread the overriding message would be that women need most of all to be given control of their own bodies, especially in terms of birth control. In countries where poor education and overpopulation are prevalent problems most women will say they want as many children as possible, or, that children are a gift from God and therefore every child a gift; but, the same women when questioned in a different context wanted fewer children. The much joked about 2.1 children per couple is close to the replacement level for most populations. Giving women control over their own reproduction cycle will bring down population and likely along with it poverty, under nourishment, disease and lack of education. The lectures are very entertaining.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

Personally, I disagree. If you artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation, the problem becomes even more critical, and fast. When each person is having 2, 3, or 4 children, that is doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the population with just ONE generation, and it is exponential. If there were no resources for 1 person, no jobs for 1 person, no healthcare for 1 person, not enough food or land for 1 person, there certainly won't be for numerous soon after.

If you really think someone taking care of a household of polio victims is deprived of opportunity, how much opportunity will they have if that household suddenly became three times as large.

Of course, education and birth control are synergistic- both are needed (and birth control is partially education already, and partially having access to pills, condoms, etc).

Re:Birth Control

[TheRealMindChild]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit... it just isn't effective as is. 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.

Sure, you can't really do this for so many obvious reasons, but it is the way people are being educated, not the education idea itself.

Re:Birth Control

[causality]

The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.

Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.

Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea. P Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.

If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.

Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

Your personal disagreement doesn't count for squat. This foundation is not just shooting the shit on the internet to decide what to do. They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.

Furthermore, your comprehension of economics seems to be rather inadequate. It's not like there are X jobs in the world, and if you have more than X people the rest are unemployed. It's not like the number of jobs is directly bound by the amount of farmland. In the developed world, an insignificant fraction of the population works in farming these days.

The European economy did not boom during the plague. It's just daft that you are suggesting as much.

A healthy population can build an economy and become a wealthy population. A sick population can't. It's that simple.

Re:Birth Control

[praksys]

It's also a lot easier to sell people on birth control if the long term survival prospects of their children are better.

Suppose each pair of parents wants at least a 95% chance that one of their children will survive to adulthood. If the mortality rate for children is 5% then many parents will settle for one child. On average there may be as few as 0.95 children surviving to adulthood per family, in which case the total population will decline rapidly. If the mortality rate is 50% then most parents will plan to have around 5 children (the probability of all five dying being 0.5^5 = 3%). On average half of all children will still survive to adulthood, so around 2.5 children will survive for each family and the population will grow steadily.

Obviously I've simplified a bit, but it is quite clear that the reduction of infant and child mortality rates is crucial to long term population control.

Re:Birth Control

[Jherico]

I think you underestimate the compulsion to accept hardship as a consequence of reproduction.

Re:Birth Control

[Dalambertian]

It's not quite that simple either. People have 12 babies because they assume that the majority of them are going to die before the age of 5. However, if you lower the infant mortality rate and the expectation of infant mortality, you actually reduce the number of children born because you can reasonably assume you'll be able to raise each child to adulthood. At least, that's what they argue in this recent TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives.html

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:Birth Control

[Nimey]

You can expect the Pope to forbid his followers from using any Pill-for-men, too.

Pity, because the most over-populated 3rd-world countries (outside of China & India) tend to be Catholic.

Re:Birth Control

[Cruciform]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit... it just isn't effective as is.

Isn't effective as is? Abstinence education isn't even education. It's indoctrination. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives people have.

You might as well try and teach Breathing Abstinence.

Before the Slashdot virgin jokes kick in, let's consider how many people here would forego sex if it was offered to them by a person they found attractive.

And how many will resort to masturbation and porn in the event that a suitable partner isn't available. Factor in those who will resort to masturbation even if they do have a regular sex partner but the sex isn't keeping up to their sex drive.

Now tell them "It's better to wait. Because Jesus will love you more." Good luck with that. The abstinence movement is just another attempt by religion to dictate your life. And it's laughable.

Teach people safe sex and birth control methods. Additionally, undo the damage done by adults teaching people that sex is dirty and something that you must feel guilty about and engage in furtively.

And that's just in the US.

In the third world countries you also have to deal with the mortality rate in children. People don't just have a lot of kids out of sheer ignorance of how children are made. If you have four kids and three of them die before they are five years old because of disease, then it's a matter of having enough children to ensure that some survive to adulthood. This common in species throughout the animal kingdom.

Make life better for people by educating them and they'll start to have less children on their own.

But teaching abstinence is about as constructive as bringing 'intelligent design' into the classroom.

Re:Birth Control

[Dan541]

Or we could start another world war.

Great news

[santax]

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.

Re:Great news

[101010_or_0x2A]

You're an idiot, and theres nothing remotely sensible in your arguments.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

If you forgive me for not mincing words, Bill Gates is still a slimy little douche, no matter how much money he's spending, and here's why.

The gist of it is that the money he's spending is stolen, basically. He made it through illegal means, took it from people like you and me, and I don't give a fuck how much of it he's gonna spend on charity now: it's still stolen.

I mean, if somebody literally broke into your house, stole a thousand bucks, and then donated 500 to charity while keeping 500 for himself, would you cheer him on and call him a hero?

And don't forget that Gates isn't even going to any lengths: he's simply donating money he couldn't possibly spend, anyway. He's got everything he could ever want to buy, and he'll continue to be able to get everything he could ever want to buy. At least normal people who donate money will actually feel it, even if it's just a little bit; donating money you can't possibly miss in the first place is easy.

And let's not forget what he's doing here: he's not interested in charity, he merely figured out that there's something he wants that he can't outright buy, namely popularity. He's already famous, of course, but most people won't think of him as a "hero", so he's trying to change that. And it seems like it worked on you, too. Who says there's things money can't buy?

Of course, all that said, I won't deny that the money itself isn't bad: pecunia non olet. But make no mistake about Gates himself: he's no hero. He's a high-profile white-collar criminal who's stolen an insane amount of money and who's now using part of it to buy the hearts of the people he stole from, all the while still living a life of incredible luxury. I fail to see what's so heroic about that.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[genghisjahn]

If they come up with a vaccine that cures curmudgeonly-pointless-cynicism, I hope you'll be one of the first in line.

$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[TheSync]

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.

Yes, but you can't actually provide medicine or sanitation to underdeveloped places. Corruption would mean the medicine would go back on the international market to richer people looking for a deal, and the sanitation building would have to pay off all kinds of government officials to get permits, etc. Then it would have to be maintained in that environment.

Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.

On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Wyatt Earp]

Yes, the project is necessary.

Look at the map here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malaria_geographic_distribution_2003.png

How many tens of billions of your anti-mosquito lasers will it take to cover that range of the Earth?

Vaccines are a technological solution.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[Duradin]

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.

[CaptainJeff]

Wow, these comments. suck.

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 /. are talking about patents, Microsoft money, etc.

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.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Archangel Michael]

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.

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:So in other words...

[qbzzt]

No, the Hispanic immigrants seem to be breeding enough to keep this problem at bay in the US.

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[TheSync]

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.

Another factor

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

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.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[TheRaven64]

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...

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[TheRaven64]

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?

Patents are relevant

[Weezul]

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.