this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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The guy that got his wealth by exploiting thousands of workers? The guy that wants to get countries in the global south to overexert their healthcare resources eradicating a disease with no major outbreaks when they have real disease outbreaks to handle, all to fuel his ego as "the guy that eradicated malaria"? The guy that lorded millions of dollars over Oxford when the university wanted to open source their covid vaccine?
Yea, he's a bastard
I guess 600,000 deaths doesn't count as an outbreak when it's happening every year.
600k deaths worldwide. If a country wants disease funding from the Bill and Malinda Gates foundation, they have to chase down all malaria cases even if there are only a few isolated cases in the entire country. The goal is noble. The method is not.
That’s the thing about the disease … it’s binary. It either exists or doesn’t. If you cure all the cases, there is nowhere to catch it. If you leave a small population with it, then there’s always the chance it comes back. My dad was vaxed for smallpox, but I am not…
Malaria's mechanism of transmission is exclusively through mosquito bites, it's a parasite that cannot be spread like COVID. Countries that are at high risk of malaria know how to track the disease and identify outbreaks so they can handle it correctly. Wiping out the disease would be great, but in the capitalist rules-based order, it's far too difficult to eradicate the disease. What the foundation is doing is forcing poor countries to focus on malaria for funding, which reduces their ability to respond to outbreaks of other diseases. It's a net negative for the countries that need the funds but have successfully managed malaria.
Say what you will. He’s out there curing a terrible disease. I could not give a shit if it’s ego driven or not.
His method is garbage. If he even remotely cared about people, he'd know it's a bad idea to lord millions of dollars over poor, third world countries to track down single, isolated cases of malaria when they're still greatly struggling with COVID.
Well. They could just not take his funding.
He could just give the money away instead of requiring it be tied to other stipulations, but he won't do that because he's NOT A GOOD HUMAN. He has no interest in actually giving away his wealth.