Gates’ pledge $10 billion call for decade of vaccines
Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates say that their foundation will more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion.
The change could save the lives of as many as eight million children by 2020, Mr. Gates calculated. He said he hoped his gift would inspire other charities and donor nations to do the same…
For starters, Mr. Gates wants to make sure that 90 percent of the world’s children get shots for routine childhood diseases like measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Right now, almost 80 percent do. But with 134 million children born each year, it is a constant struggle to keep up, and efforts can be interrupted by factors like war, natural disasters, bad roads and corrupt officials.
Then he assumes that two new vaccines against rotavirus and pneumococcal disease, which are major killers of malnourished children, are adopted as routine immunizations in most poor countries and reach 80 percent of all children by 2020.
Even in wealthy countries, the introduction of any new vaccine can be tricky because of bureaucratic and logistical delays and because unexpected rumors can spring up, like the persistent one that polio vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls…
Mr. Gates has criticized many wealthy nations for giving what he considers too little to foreign aid. On what he described as a “list of shame” in the annual letter he released this week, he noted that the United States is last on the list of 22 wealthy nations when aid is measured as a percentage of GDP.
However, Italy recently cut its foreign aid in half, which will drop it to the bottom of next year’s list, and while at Davos, Mr. Gates took a jab at Italy’s famously wealthy and vain premier, Silvio Berlusconi, telling a German newspaper, “Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria.”
Rumors in the USA are mostly confined to Republican/Libertarian cheapskates who hate to contribute to anything – including children’s health – that might diminish their personal wealth. And, of course, the religious nutball set who can come up with a different heretical plot for every day of the week.
