Bill Gates, Billionaire Philanthropy, and the Vaccine Patents

You can never be a historian just by reading secondary sources. If you’re digging through primary sources and archives, sure.

Best part is he thinks it was a gotcha when it actually perfectly proves my point. I wish I had made that point it so well supports my argument.

wait, can you become an archeology expert just by reading archeology textbooks and sitting through archeology powerpoint presentations?

I’m pretty sure if you watch every season of Bones you’re good

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If you dont travel back in time then you are no true historian, it is known.

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You literally just described university genius.

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This thread is a policy failure.

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Wait are you counting someone with an undergraduate degree as an expert in whatever they graduate in? If that’s all you’re saying, sure Bill Gates probably has at least the public health expertise of a newly-graduated college student who majored in public health.

Keeed needs the be quarantined for public health

hey, start a poll ikes. Stop whining and take action!

i know of a lot of doctors and md/phd students who got funding from gates foundation. essentially together with the federal government, they put $100k-$500k of funding per year to send an idealistic person with pretty good grades in everything upto epidemiology to africa to study malaria, or florida to study zika, etc. the outcome hopefully is some scientific progress in the form of a couple of papers, but often it’s simply the student is simply staffing a clinic there, next to a person who makes a lot less than the gates investment. whether this system make sense or is efficient is not entirely the point. it has multiple inputs and outputs, we need to invest in everything.

i don’t know the numbers but my impression that there’s hundreds of such students per year at NIH, and thousands in the country, but they don’t all work on the same things obviously. i think that alone does a lot of good for society, and fact of the matter is that the federal government could increase that funding 10x, and there would still be room for billionaires to put in more money as philanthropy or atonement or whatever.

so for practical reasons, i don’t think the gates foundation is evil, or solely whitewashing an image of an out of touch pre-zuck. it’s performing a function and helps with taking scientific long shots. but it also serves as a focal point for conspiracy theories because it helps political powers to do that. gates is pretty much in line to be the next soros.

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I don’t hate Gates even the tiniest bit. I think most people in his spot wouldn’t do any different and that includes lots of great people. I’d also like the government to not recognize/allow/defend/protect more than like $10M in property/assets max.

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Oh glad we have shifted the goal post back to “he’s a really bad guy”

Carry on.

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That sounds like kink-shaming.

Maybe, if something is not as simple as “two and two are four” we shouldn’t present it as if it were.

one way to avert an uprising is to give back in many different forms, which is what he is ostensibly doing. so i guess i agree with you but i don’t think it has anything to do with whether he is a bad guy.

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India is an outlier in the developing world with respect to drug and vaccine production, and its entire capacity for production is already on covid, because of course it’s the biggest crisis. Modi should have seen the writing on the wall and secured doses for India because the current crisis was predicable and preventable, plus it’s an actual hindu nationalist thing to do. but he wanted to declare victory before the elections instead. trmp also got gun-shy invoking defense production act, and it didn’t work for him either.

but if you take any other average developing nation that’s not capable of making a vaccine (instead of india), waiving IP law doesn’t help them. at least not without someone else having a surplus and looking for a buyer.

His wife seemingly thinks so. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Sounds like a nerd. Didn’t see “chase chicks” and “smash brews” on that list.

So how do you become a health policy expert and what did they do that Bill Gates hasn’t done in the last 25 years?