I blogged about an article on the Gates Foundation this morning. The article was written under a pseudonym. The author of the article posted the following comment this morning in response to my post:
I’m puzzled, too. When Gates first announced the foundation, my husband was at UCD working on international health and nutrition. The exact year was 1994, I think. Anyway, I confess I actually cried for joy, and I’m not easily moved by press announcements.
My disillusionment has been gradual, and in fact continues through this week. I wonder if you opened the links in my post?
You see a picture of Gates personally putting a dose of polio vaccine into a child’s mouth, in one link, as though he had bought it with his billions. It turns out later that what he bought was the leverage to spend the money my own students raise each year for Unicef, and that he used his GAVI Alliance control to engineer a secret price gouging scheme, to overcharge Unicef and the other real charities who purchase the vaccines.
That’s a cold fact, not a “conspiracy theory”, and it’s a crime when drug companies collude to raise prices. The puzzle piece missing is, as you say, a motive for the Gates Foundation. His rationale is apparently that higher profits will incentivize big Pharma to invest in research, he explained in his Forbes interview.
That turns out not to be the case. Is he deluded?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your first mistake?? Giving a dime to any U.N. organization. Bill Gates is a Eugenist and it shocks me that people would actually think he’s doing “good”.
Do you have any direct proof that Gates is a eugenicist? That is a pretty condemning statement even for one that is as misguided as Bill Gates.
I have done some poking around on the internet and I cannot find any credible links that has any real proof that Gates is a eugenicist, that his vaccine program is linked to eugenics or that his foundations aim at population control is as well. There is real science behind family size and decreased child mortality that precludes Gates Foundation involvement. There is real science behind vaccines being an effective means to eradicate disease and decrease child mortality, I am not a fan of Bill Gates, hate what his overreaching foundation is doing to the ecology, the nature of science and the bedrock of US society, public education. Inciteful comments seem negatively correlated to insightful comments.
Im not only confused…but I feel deceived. Why is this allowed? How can this be allowed?!?
In chemtchr’s piece I didn’t see a link to a GAVI/price gouging story. I may have missed it, though, since there were so many links. I did see the Unicef piece.
I am inclined to believe that Gates does want to do good but is too rich, removed, and self-assured to know what this is. His very assets become the obstacles.
Part of the problem is that he can do whatever he wants (or at least seem to do what he wants) as though by waving a magic wand. There’s something to be said for obstacles. For instance, he is convinced that classroom lectures (even at the college level) are a thing of the past. He supports the “flipped” classroom (watch video lectures at home, do interactive things in class) and will probably fund many “flipping” initiatives. Now, some “flipping” may well be helpful, but he’s wrong to dismiss the classroom lecture as dated. It’s “big ideas” of this sort that lack the necessary counterbalances and end up doing harm.
How does a person attain the ideal proportion of influence, knowledge, and humility? It seems this is extraordinarily difficult to find.
Here is how you answer your last question…take said person and place them for at least one year in charge of a city classroom of middle schoolers with a wide range of abilities and disabilities. That person is in charge of delivering the curriculum while following 504 plans, IEPS, individiualizing and differentiating and you must align your lessons to the CCSS. Keep all students on task and engaged. Take care of all discipline issues yourself; the front office doesn’t want to deal with it. Make frequent contact with the parents you can locate and attend staff meetings, workshops, district professional development, etc.
To Master Gates: Walk a mile before you speak about a profession you know nothing about.
I’ve heard of challenges to policy-makers to spend time in classrooms, but this is the first I’ve seen challenging Mr Gates to do the same. I think it’s a capital idea!
gates has no interest in spending time in a classroom and the idea that doing so would change his ideas is based on the idea that he thinks his policies are good for kids & education.
his only thoughts are about what’s good for gates and his class. they don’t care about you or your kids and it’s stupid to think they do.
There is usually the photo opted ‘concerned person’ celebrity/businessman/philanthropist who spends a day at a
‘ravaged inner city school’. The dog and pony show that they see isn’t real. They read to calmly sitting children who sit in rapt attention while the really rambunctious ones are in someone else’s class for that time. The high school ‘tours’ seem to be at the calmest high school and at the best time of day. At a previous high school. Kennedy clan members were always treated to the best show while the rest of the building was truly on lock down. We had to lock our doors, no passes out, and the real trouble makers were held in ISS with the police. Down two corriders, behind the school. They never saw the students dropping their weapons in the bushes before they entered the metal detectors. Never saw the gang wars that broke out or the five parent knife fight that sent one police officer to the hospital.
Now, what do you think these nice benefactors will think about the school. That the kids they saw were just needing a great inspiring teacher since they saw with their own eyes what the school life was like. The benefactors don’t see the six week of drill and kill test prep or the ridiculous number of mandatory assemblies for this funded program and that funded program. They won’t see the teachers scrambling for paper, working copy machines or even pencils. They won’t see the foul mouthed child or their equally charming parent. They won’t see the ADD student with no meds, the student who has to stay up and watch their siblings so will sleep all through class. They also won’t see how hard some of the students struggle in class while struggling to keep their own rage or mental health or frustration in check. They won’t meet the child who won’t wear their hearing aid or glasses since it is a sign of weakness in their ‘hood or on the bus. They won’t see how the sadness of the students who have pimps instead of parents plays out in a class.
So I say no, no to the dog and pony show. Gates and the like would not really see what school is like since no one would ever let him see what it could be like.
Hi Diana. The Unicef link is to a detailed story by DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. about the price-fixing system, and how Shanelle Hall, director of Unicef’s supply division, put her foot down and brought it to light . I’ll pull out some quotes:
“For First Time, Unicef Reveals Differences in Prices it Pays Drug Companies for Vaccines
…GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, collects billions of dollars from donors to help Unicef pay for vaccines….
…However, under an arrangement called the Advance Market Commitment that was brokered by GAVI to entice vaccine companies to keep supplying poor countries, both companies get an additional $3.50 for the first six million shots….”
http://www.ghwatch.org/node/475
You also have to know that the GAVI Alliance is Gates’ signature achievement in the world vaccination drive. He does get a lot of credit for it, but his foundation donates only about half of the 24% of its funding that comes from private donors. The vast bulk of money comes from governments, and Unicef is a paying customer. Until last month, I had assumed, like the rest of the world, that the Advance Market Commitment deal Gates innovated with the big Pharma suppliers was a discount bulk buying plan, not a price gouging scheme.
GAVI has pioneered several innovative funding mechanisms to deliver large-scale ‘predictable’ funds for its immunisation programmes.
Innovative finance includes the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) and the Advance Market Commitment (AMC).
http://www.gavialliance.org/funding/how-gavi-is-funded/
Thanks for the clarification. I don’t perceive that as price gouging, exactly. Price gouging, as I understand it, is the seller’s own elevation of prices for goods that are in high demand.
To me it looks like a tricky situation. You want as suppliers companies that meet WHO standards. You want them to continue providing vaccinations over the long term. So you offer them a deal (for the first six million shots). This should certainly be out in the open, not hidden, but is the practice itself entirely corrupt and reprehensible? Or is it mixed? I know little about this subject, so I don’t have an answer.
Price fixing might be a good term, as in collusion among the suppliers, except that GAVI also locked in the vaccine suppliers, and the buyers had to pay its fixed prices, so GAVI gouged them. Gates has been buying Pharma stock, so he’s a seller, too.
This story has actually been out for a year, but there isn’t any daylight on it until people look at it and discuss it. I do find it reprehensible.
We have massive technical capacity to address the world’s vaccine discovery needs! No, their profit motives won’t supply innovation, but we’ve let the private-market ideologues veto needed public effort.
Global Health Watch presents a different framework, for a just and honest world health development program. They’re the worlds’ actual health leaders and practitioners, not Gates and Novartis.
http://www.ghwatch.org/node/547
Telling excerpts from 2008’s Global Health Watch 2, Chapter DI-3, “The Gates Foundation.”
Click to access d1.3.pdf
– The Gates Foundation is governed by the Gates family. There is no board of trustees; nor any formal parliamentary or legislative scrutiny. There is no answerability to the governments of low-income countries, nor to the WHO. Little more than the court of public opinion exists to hold it accountable.
– According to one [expert], ‘They dominate the global health agenda and there is a lack of accountability because they do not have to implement all the checks and balances of other organizations or the bilaterals.’
– Several interviewees also felt that the way grant proposals are solicited, reviewed and funded is opaque. Many grants appear to be made on the basis of personal contacts and informal networking.
– The absence of robust systems of accountability becomes particularly pertinent in light of the Foundation’s extensive influence. As mentioned above, it has power over most of the major global health partnerships, as well as over the WHO, of which it is the third-equal biggest single funder…
– Not only is the Foundation a dominant actor within the global health landscape; it is said to be ‘domineering’ and ‘controlling’… The more they spend, the more people look to them for money and the more they dominate.’
– In the words of one interviewee: ‘The Gates Foundation is only interested in magic bullets – they came straight out and said this to me.’
– The Foundation is too dominant. It is unaccountable. It is not transparent. It is dangerously powerful and influential.
Additional gems @ http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2009/09/gates-induced-wariness.html
Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman, squashing competitors like bugs, even though they often had better computer products. His company was criticized, condemned and successfully sued in European courts for illegal practices. Hyperbolic as this may seem, a disproportionate percentage of society’s sociopaths end up as successful CEOs and top Wall Street financiers. Afterall, to be successful in these fields requires ruthlessness. Sociopathic behavior is a personality disorder. However one attempts to temper it, it is still in their genes.
Kimberley, I’m going to take time out to disagree. The conclusion that human choices are circumscribed by our genes is a heavy one, not supported by scientific evidence. A sociopath would be defined, in that system of belief, as a person whose biological response system lacks the capacity to regulate itself through social feelings like empathy, fellowship and even embarrassment or shame.
Medically, that’s a rare and terrifying condition. I’ve seen no evidence it’s associated with economic success. Have you?
For the opposite viewpoint, we have a rich and varied moral heritage that spans all cultures and languages. I’m a humanist and an existentialist, but I treasure Pope John XXIII’s proclamation, in his papal encyclical Pacem in Terris
“The moral voice in every human heart is the voice of God.”
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/John23/j23pacem.htm
In my own (actually, John Paul Sartre’s) analysis, it’s the very fear of acknowledging their own freedom that cripples these CEO’s. Gates defined himself through his Foundation, but now looks into it as a mirror, allows its institutional power to define him, and it limits his own free choice. Like Sartre’s self-deceiving waiter, he takes up stereotypical billionaire behaviors, like investing in despicable stocks, to protect himself from his real freedom to choose among alternatives he finds unacceptably expensive.
The waiter and the technocrat CEO are free, and fully human. They can’t escape that freedom, even if they want to. So, in their difficulties, they still champion humanity itself when they fail or succeed to embrace it. It’s wrong to renounce anybody’s humanity.
I can’t prove this, but history and literature are full of anecdotal evidence. Here’s the proposition we’re arguing:
Bill Gates: Naked Emperor, or Defective Puppy?