Bill Gates vaccine donations
Yesterday it was reported that Steve Jobs brought the tablets down from the mountain.
Today Bill Gates hits the headlines with an announcement about his latest philanthropic project:
…the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, is to make the largest ever single charitable donation with a pledge of $10 billion (£6 billion) for vaccine work over the next decade.
“We must make this the decade of vaccines,” Mr Gates said. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”
Mr Gates and his wife, Melinda, made their announcement at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, where they were joined by Julian Lob-Levyt, the head of the vaccine consortium, the GAVI Alliance.“Vaccines are a miracle. With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime,” Mrs Gates said. “We’ve made vaccines our No 1 priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their incredible impact on children’s lives.”
Among the infections to be targeted with the money are rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhoea, and pneumococcal disease, which causes pneumonia, blood poisoning, and a form of meningitis. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has used a model developed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, to project the potential impact of vaccines on childhood deaths over the next decade.
By significantly scaling up the delivery of life-saving vaccines in developing countries to 90 per cent coverage — including the new vaccines to prevent severe diarrhoea and pneumonia — the model suggests that the deaths of 7.6 million children under the age of 5 could be prevented between now and 2019. It also estimates that an additional 1.1 million children could be saved with the rapid introduction of a malaria vaccine beginning in 2014.
Mr Gates said that if additional vaccines such as for tuberculosis were developed and introduced in this decade even more lives could be saved.
5 Responses to “Bill Gates vaccine donations”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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I wonder though (and I don’t question Mr Gates’s generosity) if spending $US 10 billion on economic improvements would be better thus allowing the poor to fund their own immunisation.
Self help always beats a hand out. Teach a man to fish …
Gates has come a long way. Especially since he admitted having clean drinking water was a higher priority than “a PC in every home in Africa”.
Actually I partially retract that statement. If he was to fund a vaccine programme to eradicate a disease like smallpox or polio then a one man funded one-off event would be of great benefit for the population for centuries to come.
However, malaria like The Poor, will always be with us. Though not money wasted clearly.
yeah I agree – you can always think of a better way something could have been done, or analyse motives, etc – but the bottom line is, he’s doing something! so let’s celebrate that.
Years ago I visited Mother Teresa of Calcutta and came to a similar conclusion. I felt with the same resources she would be better solving the problems of the slums rather than treating the symptoms. But then I noticed nobody else was doing anything else except for the Marie Stopes lot who didn’t seem to bring a lot of love to the table. A bit of a whiff of eugenics.
On leaving a little boy pestered me in Howrah railway station, begging for food or money. I handed him a small banana rather than money (’slumdog’ rackets blah, blah..). He ran away broke it in half and gave the other end to his friend. I almost died of shame.
This has got to be one of the biggest waste of money! Although vaccines do serve there purpose, they are not the answer to saving lives. People need to strengthen their immune systems through healthy life style choices and not rely on vaccines to protect them from disease. Vaccines come with their own inherent risks. Many people have and will die from the actual vaccine and it’s toxins.