Bill Gates Promotes Vaccine Projects, Swipes At Google

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bill Gates discussed his Foundation's work to eradicate polio and malaria, while suggesting that vaccine programs and similar initiatives to fight disease and poverty will ultimately do much more for the world than technology projects devoted to connecting everybody to the Internet. While Gates professes his belief in the so-called digital revolution, he doesn't think projects such as Google's Internet blimps (designed to transmit WiFi signals over hundreds of miles, bringing Internet to underserved areas in the process) will do the third world nearly as much as good as basic healthcare. "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that [Internet] balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you," he said. "When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there's no website that relieves that." Gates then sharpened his attack on the search-engine giant: "Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down." Google focusing on its core mission is fine, he added, "but the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor." The Microsoft co-founder also has no intention of following Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech entrepreneurs into the realm of space exploration. "I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into.""

Comments

Idea

[twistedcubic]

I've got an idea. How about we cure malaria AND give everyone free internet. I never thought Bill Gates was a jealous hater. He's beginning to see Microsoft as the failure it really is.

Re:Idea

[Joining Yet Again]

Or he's trying to drag other very wealthy people out of their comfort zone.

He doesn't have to do any of this, you know.

Re:Idea

[jellomizer]

The Gates foundation follows a very methodological approach to charity.
They calculate how much good you will get per dollar. The gates foundation sees the Cost of curing malaria vs. the Good of curing malaria is a good deal. While Internet balloons cost vs good is much less.

It isn't as much that Internet balloons are a bad idea, however the good produced from it isn't worth the cost.

   

Re:Idea

[Penguinisto]

Well he does, sorta... if it weren't for the massive charitable 'contribution' he gave former Prez. Vicente Fox' wife for her 'charity (causing a planned migration to Linux to instead swerve back towards Windows)', Mexico would've been using primarily Linux by now, reducing Microsoft's market share (and thus its stock price, thus Gates' bank account, etc).

Hell, I suspect the whole third world would've been using Linux by now judging by that one yardstick...

Re:Idea

[rudy_wayne]

Or he's trying to drag other very wealthy people out of their comfort zone.

He doesn't have to do any of this, you know.

Bill Gates is not the philanthropist he pretends to be.

The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.

In Niger, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These firms have been responsible for much of the pollution causing respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.

The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical.

  It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.

Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.

In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has gone from $50 Billion to $70 Billion over the last 3 years.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the ugly truth is that you can't fix disease or poverty in any of those places where they are endemic by handing out medicines and training people. Until you can jail all of the corrupt dictators, war lords, and their cronies the stuff you distribute ends up in their warehouses and is sold by them for profit. The skills people learn are worth exactly squat when they can't ply their trade because there is no real economy. It is hard - too hard for me, I am not smart enough to solve it - to fix the root problems. But until the bad actors and bullies are driven out you can throw lots of money at these problems and they just persist.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada tried that process. Look how well it worked for them.

Oh, wait... it actually worked for them. Sorry, nevermind.

Re:Idea

[MightyYar]

The Soviets tried that process. Look how well it worked for them.

That's not the approach that the Soviets took, they went with single provider (like the UK or the VA). Switzerland has the individual mandate, and they are 20 years in and spending 11% of their GDP where we spend 16% of ours.

Re:Idea

[DigiShaman]

What you and everyone else is missing (possible Billy G too) is that all of these problems he's trying to address is caused by dictatorships, despots and other forms of corruption and tyranny. Education and good health will pave way for a future generation to actually change the culture to one that's confident in the ability to demand freedom and democracy. Regardless, the culture must be there for it to happen. Otherwise, we (the West) is just continually pumping water out of a leaky boat. A complete waste of time and money with lives depending on keeping it afloat.

Re:Idea

[Joining Yet Again]

None of the above is counter to philanthropy - these are Foundation investments, not Bill's personal portfolio.

Have you also considered that the Foundation disagrees with your viewpoint that these investments have practices running "counter to the foundation's supposed charitable goals and social mission"? Last I checked, it didn't intend to create an egalitarian utopia, where the poor weren't being exploited by the rich, but to solve a few fundamental problems.

If you think some of the Foundation's investments are running counter to its specific goals, rather than more hand-wavy goals about progressive work in Third World nations, go ahead and put your case to the guys who do the cost-benefit analysis.

Every charitable mission can be identified as in some way contributing toward some sort of nastiness, even right down to the fact that no bank makes 100% ethical investments for every person's definition of ethical.

Re:Idea

[MightyYar]

If you approach all problems that way, nothing at the bottom of the pile ever gets fixed. I'm glad that there are eccentric people out there that want to help even the smaller numbers of people. It's like a big bug database with a whole bunch of level 5 bugs that never get addressed because everyone chases the higher priority stuff. Pretty soon you end up with thousands of unresolved "minor" bugs that make your software seem crappy even though most of the big bugs are fixed. Life is like that, too. You might wonder why your house looks like shit even though it is structurally sound, has a good roof, and all of the appliances work. Turns out it's because you haven't done any decorating in 20 years. Sure, it's trivial, but when you add up all the minor stuff, the minor stuff starts to look more important in aggregate.

I have no idea if internet access would be as helpful as clean drinking water. I mean, in the short term it is a no-brainier, but will the improvement stick around when the Gate Foundation leaves or will the people start dying again? I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm glad someone is trying to build up their lacking internet infrastructure with their own money that could have just gone to another party jet. It might not help as much as clean drinking water, but it certainly won't do any harm.

Re:Idea

[SilentStaid]

Spoken like a true Canadian, with the apology for the burn at the end.

Re:Idea

[SuricouRaven]

The UK's healthcare system is ill-managed, under-funded, and constantly in traumatic reform as it's become a political football always kicked around between factions. The waiting lists are long, the wards overcrowded, and the hospitals understaffed.

And yet we still managed to beat the US on every major metric of public health, with the exception of cancer survival rates - and we spend a smaller portion of GDP on it via taxes than the US does via insurance premiums and medical bills.

Even our badly-run mess of a single provider manages to beat the US. Really, America... when you are being beaten in the life expectancy charts by the like of *Cuba*, you really need to admit you are failing.

Re:Idea

[Charliemopps]

I've been to africa. Internets not going to do them a damn bit of good. Most don't even have toilets. I watched a man die in front of my eyes because he fell a short distance out of a tree and there were no doctors within several hundred kilometers. These people didn't even have lightbulbs in most cases... 40% of the continet doesn't even have basic litteracy in their own native language and to get any use out of the internet they're going to have to speak English, French, spanish, etc... There are over 3000 languages in africa, most of which don't even have character sets available for any computer much less websites written in them. The idea that "The internet" is going to help Africa in any way what-so-ever only makes sense if you've never been there.

They need:
Clean water
Toilets/Sanitation
birth control
Basic Edgucation (litteracy)
The West and China to stop funding warlords in exchange for mineral rights.

Re:Idea

[wireloose]

Dow manufactured Agent Orange for the military. Only last year, Dow finally agreed with the EPA to clean up dioxin spills around its plant in Midland, Michigan, where they produced dioxin for almost 100 years, and it fought the cleanup for almost 20 years. That alone is a very bad record. If you really want more citations, just use Google. There are plenty.

Re:Idea

[MightyYar]

The problem in the US is that we already had socialized health care, thanks to a Reagan-era law, but we refused to admit it. We passed a law in the 80s making it illegal to refuse emergency treatment. This of course means that uninsured people wait until they need emergency care, then get very expensive care that they cannot pay for. The rest of us are left picking up the tab, and hospitals and emergency facilities in poor areas either close or get subsidized by the state and local authorities. One ER doc, who may or may not have been exaggerating, claimed that it would be cheaper to ride a doctor to each person's house in a limo for house calls than to treat everyone without insurance in the ER.

I'm generally against "unfunded mandates" such as the emergency care rule, and I'm generally against the idea of refusing emergency care. That leaves me with no choice but to reluctantly admit that I support some form of socialized health care. I would have preferred less emphasis on Medicaid in the Obamacare system, but it's better than what we had.

Re:Idea

[KiloByte]

This is perhaps grossly politically incorrect, but: feeding and/or healing people in poorest parts of the world does nothing good in the long run. It only means they will reproduce more, having even more starving sick children. Promoting local means of drug manufacture could at least have a meaningful effect on their quality of life, but Gates Foundation's gifts come with strings attached: countries that want to get free drugs need to enact "intellectual property" laws that in the long run deprive them of availability of such drugs.

Google's internet baloons, on the other hand, lets those people obtain education. This lets kids escape the deadly circle of starvation and cranking out more kids for local warlords' private armies.

Re:Idea

[Ioldanach]

None of the above is counter to philanthropy - these are Foundation investments, not Bill's personal portfolio.

Have you also considered that the Foundation disagrees with your viewpoint that these investments have practices running "counter to the foundation's supposed charitable goals and social mission"? ...

Also bear in mind that substantial investments in major corporations can give the investor some sway in the corporation's decisions. If a major stakeholder threatens to pull out, it can injure the corporation, so when a major stakeholder tries to effect change, the corporation is more likely to listen.

Re:Idea

[oGMo]

You're overlooking the bigger picture in an attempt to rationalize your portfolio. Your "good investment" makes money when people want the stock, which generally means when the company does well (or just looks good). The company and its board own the majority of those shares. A windfall for you is a massive increase in their net. Anytime you make money from them, they are making tons of money doing probably-bad things and passing those profits on to willing investors. You.

If everyone on the other hand tried to sell the stock, the value would crash and the company would go under because everyone was trying to jump ship and sell to squeeze the last bit of profit out of it. But they don't, because people, yourself included, are completely supporting them doing bad things, because they give you money. Rationalize all you want, but you are a supporter.

Re:Idea

[oGMo]

What you and everyone else is missing (possible Billy G too) is that all of these problems he's trying to address is caused by dictatorships, despots and other forms of corruption and tyranny.

I don't see the GP missing this at all, merely pointing out the less-than-philanthropic side of The Gates Foundation. The GP is saying more that the foundation is a front for Gates' personal profit than actually doing something good.

Your point is more applicable to Gates' statement itself: Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs. Ideally, information on things like purifying water, health, etc can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. Of course, this may not work out ideally, but it's something more toward the root of the problem than establishing control by drugs.

Re:Idea

[sinij]

The part where you frame argument in a way it becomes impossible to have a civil conversation about the issue.

Your "armed men confiscating property by force" (aka taxation) is the glue that makes civil society possible. If you don't like governments (or society) that much, you are welcome to move to somewhere else, like Somalia, where they don't have these things.

Re: Idea

[paiute]

He should hoard money like Ellison, Brin, Page, and Jobs! That will help the poor!

They may not be helping the poor, but at least the other fellows aren't kicking them while they're down.

The Internet lately has been full of the meme that Gates will be famous centuries from now while Jobs will be forgotten. Here's an alternate scenario: Gates concentrates more and more on wiping out disease and feeding the world. This enables the population to balloon out of all sustainability, wrecking the environment. Then when humanity is like a teeming Petri dish, a pathogen evolves which incurable and virulent and takes out 90% of humans. Gates' name is cursed by the wretched survivors trying to survive on a poisoned, strip-mined Earth.

Re:Idea

[stymy]

The Gates Foundation is run as a business, which is why it has been so successful thus far. One side effect of that is that the investing branch of the charity is completely separate from the charity part. So the investors just try to maximize the return on investment of the Foundation, while the charity people figure out how to spend the money.

Re:Idea

[Artifakt]

Dow has what I would argue is an objectively bad record, but...
          One of the reasons you can say "very bad" and ackthpt can say "very good" is that "bad" or "good" for Dow usually means 'in comparison to other representitives of the industry'. (I don't claim to know what either you or ackthpt were thinking, beyond what you or he (?) actually posted, but that does seem to be common to many people making such evaluations).
            Many people forget that Union Carbide is now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary, but at the time of the Bhopal disaster, was a competing corporation - Dow bought them 17 years later. Do we count that as Dow was at least better than UC, and UC is not as bad now that Dow owns it, or not? Surely we don't blame Bhopal on Dow?
            Morton-Thiokol had a magnesium related explosion in 1971 that killed 29 people and injured about 50 others, but the official cause of that one is that the US government gave them some very bad advice about some unusual additional explosive risks, known to the military but not to most civilian chemists, in storing magnesium based flares in extreme bulk, in spaces which didn't have powered venting and detectors, and otherwise even hundreds of flares burning off wouldn't have led to an actual explosion. Probably, M-T has a better environmental record for the same time frame than Dow, but that's if we believe the causes of the M-T 1971 Georgia explosion have been adequately analyzed by the courts.
        The chemical industry in general is bad on both the safety and environmental records. Searching for "Chemical Industry Accidents", "Industrial Disasters" or such terms doesn't yield much evidence, but try searching for "Superfund Sites" and see how many of these tie to the major chemical industry players. Even if Dow somehow stood near the top of the pack in their industry (they don't), it's a lousy industry.

Re:Idea

[sinij]

>>>However, there is a clear cut difference between taxes which support necessary infrastructure and a "tax" which is specifically designed to prop up one segment of the population at the expense of others.
All taxes can be framed as "prop up one segment of the population at the expense of others". This misrepresentation is what make these libertarian arguments unsound. Even taxation to support infrastructure, if you don't happen to use it, can be framed that way.

Idea behind civil society is that individual members sacrifice something so collectively we all can be better off. In the absence of this, sure someone ends up a warlord and better off for that, but clear majority end up oppressed and impoverished.

Lack of Vision

[lazarus]

"I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into."

Sounds like he has no more vision now than he did when he was running Microsoft. I am totally in favour of his philanthropic work, and I agree with him that we should solve the difficult people problems first, but dismissing space exploration or the benefits of connectivity for the purposes of educating the third world out of poverty is short sighted.

That's Just Silly

[cervesaebraciator]

Microsoft isn't out saving the poor from malaria, Bill Gates is. Why should Bill Gates expect Google as a corporation to be doing what he's doing as an individual philanthropist, rather than floating internet balloons which holds long-term potential for shareholders?

Re:That's Just Silly

[phantomfive]

Gates is a typical alpha-geek. Hyper-competitive, he's always looking for ways to show he is better than other people, always has. It's something that motivates him.

Now he's interested in doing philanthropy, he's finding ways his philanthropy is better than what everyone else is doing. If you read interviews with him back in the 80s (like this one), you'll see he does the same thing.

not really a "fight" - thank God...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates does not waste his time "attacking" Google - he just answers questions.

-question: "One of Google’s (GOOG) convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems?"
-answer: "When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.
Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor."

The same about the "shooting rockets" thing!
-question: "There are other successful businessmen who are orienting their extracurricular interests around space exploration. Is that interesting to you? Is that worthwhile for humanity?"
-answer: "Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into."

Keep saving the world Bill - God bless you!

Re:Space exploration a waste of money

[lazarus]

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
--Robert A. Heinlein.

I understand what you are saying, but I just don't agree. Despite what Hollywood tells you, when that asteroid is on its way Bruce Willis will not be able to save you. We need options, and the sooner the better. "A footnote of history" will be a meaningless phrase (though apropos) if there is nobody to write or read it.

Although somehow it would be fitting if the only thing to survive were the space robots...

Re:He's right, of course.

[the gnat]

I can think of a dozen better ways to spend that money, but other rich fucks have those already. If he wants to do good, how about paying taxes, reparations for the companies that he destroyed, jail time for the politicians that he bought, etc.

Fine, what are the dozen other better ways to spend the money than trying to cure diseases that afflict millions? Paying taxes instead is simply going to perpetuate our military-industrial complex and bloated entitlement programs. I honestly don't care if Bill Gates is doing this work out of the goodness of his heart or just because he's an egotist; I care about whether it actually does some good. It won't excuse the awful mess that is Microsoft Windows, but if he really does help end malaria, he'll have improved vastly more lives than he ever destroyed (and frankly I'm skeptical that anyone's life was "destroyed" by his business practices; some people simply didn't get rich. boo-hoo.).

Now mod me to oblivion. For some reason Slashdot just can't not drink this cool-aid.

Trite statements like this just make you look like a self-absorbed douche. At least two-thirds of the comments on this story so far are anti-Gates, so you're not exactly speaking truth to power here.

Re:Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

internet connectivity and laptops are a First World solution to a non-existant problem - I haven't been convinced that the lack of internet connections is truly a problem in the Third World.

The lack of internet is not a problem. However lack of opportunity for education is. Providing Internet access is the 21st century version of building a library.

It's not as high up on the priority list of people who are starving or dyeing from disease, but there are issues with simply handing out food and cures. As the saying goes "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime".

Providing the means for people to educate themselves and solve their own problems is a better long term solution, and there's no reason to not pursue it in parallel to the more imminent handouts.

Gates needs to see it from other viewpoints

[QuietLagoon]

1) The wi-fi balloons will provide the needed networking infrastructure in those areas, infrastructure that assists the medical and other health professionals with their tasks.

.
2) Gates is an individual, google is a corporation. Apples and oranges to compare the two.

Gates needs to look past his self-important blinders and see the whole picture.

Re:He's right, of course.

[Zalbik]

Why is Bill Gates comparing himself to a corporation like Google?

FFS, can you people bother to RTFA?

Say it with me: RTFA

Once more, all together now: READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE!

He didn't compare himself to Google, he was specifically asked to comment on Google's internet-blimp initiative and whether he thought it would help poorer countries.

Stupid sensationalist summary begets stupid irrelevant comments. Another typical day on Slashdot.....