Bill Gates Donates $750 million for Vaccinations

Regular readers will know that the Kensington Review isn’t particularly enthralled with Bill Gates, Microsoft or its products. They will also remember that this journal has something of an obsession when it comes to global vaccination programs and other inexpensive ways of saving lives. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has just announced a 10-year program that will spend $750 million to vaccinate kids in poor countries. Mr. Gates’ shortcomings are readily ignored.

In addition to the Gates Foundation, Norway will cough up a further $290 million over the next five years for the same thing. All the money, more than $1 billion, will go to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which is a combination of governments and aid organizations dedicated “protecting children of all nations and of all socioeconomic levels against vaccine-preventable diseases.”

The money will get 10 million kids shots they need to protect them from tuberculosis, polio, tetanus, hepatitis B, and measles by 2015. According to a Business Week story, “In addition, these funds allow vaccines in late-stage trials to reach poor children faster. These include vaccines for rotavirus, which initiates sometimes fatal diarrhea, and pneumococcus, which causes meningitis.”

The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 27 million children don’t get the vaccines they need – vaccines that the kid in Los Angeles, London or Lisbon gets as a matter of course. The WHO says that 2.1 million kids died in 2002 because they didn’t get jabbed. And the WHO also says that saving a life with vaccines costs less than $1,000.

There is a lot more to do. HIV, malaria and diarrhea from contaminated water are the biggest killers, and it costs money to fix these things. Mr. Gates and other donors to GAVI, though, have discovered a simple truth. Wealth is not an end but a means. It is a tool to accomplish one’s objectives. It is hard to think of a more worthy objective than protecting the health of millions.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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