Like I said before, a waiver for a covid vaccine doesn’t credibly threaten real estate, stocks, software IP, etc. Your reasoning doesn’t make sense to any somewhat rational person.
Is Joe Flacco an Expert QB?
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Sadly, yes
No such thing
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60571-7/fulltext
Not harm, but presumably actual public health experts concerned about how the foundation spends its money on public health
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a major contributor to global health; its influence on international health policy and the design of global health programmes and initiatives is profound. Although the foundation’s contribution to global health generally receives acclaim, fairly little is known about its grant-making programme. We undertook an analysis of 1094 global health grants awarded between January, 1998, and December, 2007. We found that the total value of these grants was US$8·95 billion, of which $5·82 billion (65%) was shared by only 20 organisations. Nevertheless, a wide range of global health organisations, such as WHO, the GAVI Alliance, the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, prominent universities, and non-governmental organisations received grants. $3·62 billion (40% of all funding) was given to supranational organisations. Of the remaining amount, 82% went to recipients based in the USA. Just over a third ($3·27 billion) of funding was allocated to research and development (mainly for vaccines and microbicides), or to basic science research. The findings of this report raise several questions about the foundation’s global health grant-making programme, which needs further research and assessment.
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I’d be more willing to posit that Gates thinks Microsoft’s success was an unqualified good for society that was enabled by strong IP protection, so that dismantling IP will lead to fewer good things that benefit society. I think that’s a better argument than economic self-interest.
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This article from 2015 (!) calls into question Gates’ emphasis on IP and has some links to articles criticizing the foundation’s focus, including the article above
From this article, a quote of a quote since I can’t access the original without an account:
For similar reasons, the Gates Foundation’s work on malaria drew criticism from some corners. In a 2013 article in Global Society , Youde pointed out that the head of WHO’s malaria research, Arata Kochi, sent a memo complaining that the foundation “was stifling debate on the best ways to treat and combat malaria, prioritising only those methods that relied on new technology or developing new drugs.”
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Interesting article and criticisms—I find the notion of strengthening health systems apt, and one that the foundation apparently eschews—but it seems ungenerous to bite the hand that inoculates.
May 17, 2002
Come on.
eta: i’m not sure, but i don’t think gates actually profits from the gates foundation doing well too
He completely controls the Bill or Melinda Gates Foundation!
I’m not a Bill Gates stan by any means, but this line that people are trying to draw from his opposition to open sourcing the vaccine to his own self interest is extremely tenuous and constantly changing when each instance of ridiculousness is pointed out.
I think the explanation is much simpler. He thinks his way would be best, he’s just wrong. Yeah, he knows a lot about global health, but doesn’t mean 100% percent of his good faith decisions are correct.
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It’s in the middle, Gates probably reached his conclusion in good faith but as one of the richest people in the world he is self-selected for the type of person who would make this decision because he has a lot of the bad traits his critics ascribe to him ITT.
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I don’t think that’s the middle at all. It’s completely consistent with what I’m saying. Unless I’m misreading all these posts, the Gates haters seem to all be putting forward some bad faith theory of his actions.
I think he’s just wrong. You’ve explained why he might be wrong. That’s plausible. I’ve got no problem with that.
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Though the haters are suspicious of bad faith, imo one would be meeting them halfway if they thought something like “Gates is a greedy sociopath who has an irrational need to justify the system that made, and is still making him, filthy rich…”
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Sure all of this may be true but still has absolutely no bearing on if vaccine patents should be waived.
A bad guy can have good ideas and bad ideas. His being bad is never sufficient to decide which. Same goes for a good guy.
It can be all of these things.
His wealth came from privilege and harmful capitalistic practices. This is undeniable.
He wanted to rehabilitate his image and so contributed a lot of money to an organization that accomplishes some good things.
He has a heavy say in how this money is used.
He is resistant to criticism and, like everyone, is influenced by incentives and his own personal experience.
The result of all of these things is a worse result than humanity would have gotten had we taxed his/Microsoft’s money properly and committed it to public policy dictated by actual experts. I also think the incentives at play here makes it incredibly naive to take his rationalizing at face value, because OF COURSE he is going to say these things (and he may very well believe them). We shouldn’t have public policy dictated by one dude just because he’s wealthy, and he deserves every bit of criticism he gets when he sticks his nose into these issues.
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Generally agree, but I just don’t see how we can ignore his history when evaluating his point of view on something as critical as mid-pandemic public health policy.
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Good article on how the Bill or Melinda Gates Foundation is a huge scam:
https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/1388060217057976321
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Did you actually read that article? I hope you posted it as a meta joke on the conversation we were having? It’s a quintessential example of “gates was a bad guy so everything he ever does is obviously bad” logic.
It’s literally 95% about how gates was a really bad guy at Microsoft then they add a couple sentences at the end tangentially about his foundation. Then slap a headline on it about how the foundation is a scam.
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