On Monday, in a Manhattan town house that once belonged to polio’s most famous victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Gates made an appeal for one more big push to wipe out world polio.
Although that battle began in 1985 and Mr. Gates started making regular donations to it only in 2005, he has emerged in the last two years both as one of the biggest donors — he has now given $1.3 billion, more than the amount raised over 25 years by Rotary International — and as the loudest voice for eradication.
As new outbreaks create new setbacks each year, he has given ever more money, not only for research but for the grinding work on the ground: paying millions of vaccinators $2 or $3 stipends to get pink polio drops into the mouths of children in villages, slums, markets and train stations.
He also journeys to remote Indian and Nigerian villages to be photographed giving the drops himself. Though he lacks Angelina Jolie’s pneumatic allure, his lingering “world’s richest man” cologne is just as aphrodisiacal to TV cameras.
He also uses that celebrity to press political leaders. Rich Gulf nations have been criticized for giving little for a disease that now chiefly affects Muslim children; last week in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Gates and Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan jointly donated $50 million each to vaccinate children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Gates and the British prime minister, David Cameron, announced that Britain would double its $30 million donation. Last month, when the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, went to Washington for the diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke’s funeral, Mr. Gates offered him $65 million to initiate a new polio drive. Twelve days later, publicly thanking him, Mr. Zardari did so.
However, even as he presses forward, Mr. Gates faces a hard question from some eradication experts and bioethicists: Is it right to keep trying?
Although caseloads are down more than 99 percent since the campaign began in 1985, getting rid of the last 1 percent has been like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death. As the vaccination fist closes in one country, the virus bursts out in another.
In 1985, Rotary raised $120 million to do the job as its year 2000 “gift to the world.”
The effort has now cost $9 billion, and each year consumes another $1 billion.
By contrast, the 14-year drive to wipe out smallpox, according to Dr. Donald A. Henderson, the former World Health Organization officer who began it, cost only $500 million in today’s dollars.
Dr. Henderson has argued so outspokenly that polio cannot be eradicated that he said in an interview last week: “I’m one of certain people that the W.H.O. doesn’t invite to its experts’ meetings anymore.”
Recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, the influential British medical journal, said via Twitter that “Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other critical BMGF areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.” (The initials are for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
And Arthur L. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s bioethics center, who himself spent nine months in a hospital with polio as a child, said in an interview, “We ought to admit that the best we can achieve is control.”
Those arguments infuriate Mr. Gates. “These cynics should do a real paper that says how many kids they’re really talking about,” he said in an interview. “If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children a year.”
Right now, there are fewer than 2,000. The skeptics acknowledge that they are arguing for accepting more paralysis and death as the price of shifting that $1 billion to vaccines and other measures that prevent millions of deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, meningitis and malaria.
“And think of all the money that would be saved,” Mr. Gates went on, turning sarcastic. “It’d be like 5 percent of the dog food market in the United States.”
Keep reading in the article and you'll discover that the Obama administration is deferring to Gates as the most knowledgeable man on the planet when it comes to polio:
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chief bioethicist for the National Institutes of Health, who is seen as a powerful influence within the Obama administration, said he had “not seen enough data to have a definitive opinion.”
“But my intuition is that eradication is probably worth it,” he added. “As with smallpox, the last mile is tough, but we’ve gotten huge benefits from it. But without the data, I defer to people who’ve really studied the issue, like Bill Gates.”
The W.H.O. recently created a panel of nine scientists meant to be independent of all sides in the debate to monitor progress through 2012 and make recommendations.
Dr. David L. Heymann, a former W.H.O. chief of polio eradication, said he was still “very optimistic” that eradication could be achieved.
Doesn't all this sound familiar?
An egotistical billionaire monopolist thinks only HE has ALL the answers to a societal problem, he spends tons of money to set the agenda to solve the societal problem, critics point out that he doesn't know what the f#$% he is talking about and show how he is doing more harm than good by spending all this money to set the agenda, but the people in power defer to the egotistical billionaire monopolist anyway.
Like Yogi Berra is reported to have said "It's like deja vu all over again."
I do know one thing though: It is good to see this kind of negative Bill Gates story make it into the corporate media.
It helps to reinforce the point that Gates is doing more harm than good in many of the areas he is giving money - from disease eradication to food distribution (where he favors GMO food) to education reform.
It lays the groundwork to pushback against his education reform policies.
Money is how we keep score, ergo Gates knows more than anyone.
ReplyDeleteThat's why Bloomberg thinks he knows so much too.
ReplyDeleteWow. Maybe you should stop and think about what you're saying. You're hatred for this man's education research is driving you to insist he stop working to eradicate polio? POLIO?! Because he's looking at different ways to evaluate teachers you think he's ruining the world by also trying to save children from one of the most crippling diseases on the planet?
ReplyDeleteLook, feel free to disagree with the Foundation's educational ideas. But are you really advocating that he should stop using his wealth to end child sickness and death in developing countries?
Another anonymous--my views are different. Gates and all the other wealthy ed. deformers (the Waltons, Broad, etc.) are trying to impose their philosophies, in a godlike fashion, on everybody else and are able to do so because their extreme wealth. They should be forced to pay taxes up the wazoo--which could do a lot for the common good and would allow societal decisions to be made by the (so-called, these days) democratic process. If I understand RBE correctly, he is referring to the fact that these philanthropists plow into areas where they have little real knowledge and do harm in the process. Remember the old say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? Everybody treats these uber-rich like they are authorities simply because they have wealth and power.
ReplyDeleteDid you read the article, second anon? It says that Gates is harming disease eradication by insisting that millions be spent on polio eradication when many scientists think it just cannot be done and the money would be better spent to fight other diseases.
ReplyDelete