Bill Gates comes under fire after comments on global vaccine shortage

[riversedge]

Source: raw story


April 27, 2021



Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men and most powerful philanthropists, was the target of criticism from social justice campaigners on Sunday after arguing that lifting patent protections on Covid-19 vaccine technology and sharing recipes with the world to foster a massive ramp up in manufacturing and distribution— despite a growing international call to do exactly that—is a bad idea.
................

Asked to explain why not, Gates—whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth—said that: "Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done—moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India—it's novel—it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."


The reference is to the Serum factory in India, the largest such institute in the country, which has contracts with AstraZeneca to manufacture their Covid-19 vaccine, known internationally as Covishield.


The thing that's holding "things back" in terms of the global vaccine rollout, continued Gates, "is not intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you've got to do the trial on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way."

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/bill-gates-vaccine-2652793168/

---

He has an important point. I do not know what the answer is.

Link to tweet

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Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pictured at an interview with AFP in Berlin on January 27, 2015 (AFP)

Link to tweet

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[riversedge]

1. What!?! Are you telling me greedy Billionaires might not be good people? I'm gonna need some time

What!?!
Are you telling me greedy Billionaires might not be good people?

I’m gonna need some time to process this new info
Face with tears of joy

Link to tweet

?s=20

[riversedge]

4. Book: Philanthro-capitalism: How charity became big business

I have been meaning to read this book for awhile now. I am going to check it out from the library.

Link to tweet

?s=20


If you really want to understand more about the Gates Foundation & its impact on global public health, go buy this book from the fantastic @LinseyMcgoey
:


https://versobooks.com/books/2344-no





No Such Thing as a Free Gift
The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey


Philanthro-capitalism: How charity became big business


https://www.versobooks.com/books/2344-no-such-thing-as-a-free-gift

The charitable sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the global economy. Nearly half of the more than 85,000 private foundations in the United States have come into being since the year 2000. Just under 5,000 more were established in 2011 alone. This deluge of philanthropy has helped create a world where billionaires wield more power over education policy, global agriculture, and global health than ever before.

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift, author and academic Linsey McGoey puts this new golden age of philanthropy under the microscope—paying particular attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As large charitable organizations replace governments as the providers of social welfare, their largesse becomes suspect. The businesses fronting the money often create the very economic instability and inequality the foundations are purported to solve. We are entering an age when the ideals of social justice are dependent on the strained rectitude and questionable generosity of the mega-rich.

[cayugafalls]

16. The only reason Bill Gates became philanthropic was because he was forced to by our government.

Back in the 90's when Microsoft was under assault for Monopoly, Gate's father (Lawyer and Washington insider), advised Bill that it was time to either pay the piper or suffer the break up.

Bill Gates was always greedy and never liked Washington or politics.

“Whenever you get to be a super-valuable company, affecting the way people communicate and even political discourse being mediated through your system and higher percentage of commerce — through your system — you’re going to expect a lot of government attention,” ....snip....

“I was naive at Microsoft and didn’t realize that our success would lead to government attention,” Gates said, referring to Microsoft’s antitrust challenges from more than 20 years ago. “And so I made some mistakes — you know, just saying, ‘Hey, I never go to Washington, D.C.’ And now I don’t think, you know, that naivete is there.”

CNBC

[Mosby]

31. How's that monopoly going?

Gates said it himself back then and everybody laughed and laughed. MS was never a monopoly, and they had every right to give away a browser.

Seems kinda quaint now to fine a company billions of dollars for giving away free software, doesn't it?

[cayugafalls]

33. It was never about the monopoly, it was about giving money to politicians and other rich people.

Bill was not a person to spread his money around and his father let him know that if he did not start playing the game, the game would play him.

[Mosby]

35. Microsoft fined by European Commission over web browser

Microsoft has been fined 561m euros ($731m; £484m) for failing to promote a range of web browsers, rather than just Internet Explorer, to users in the European Union (EU).

It introduced a Browser Choice Screen pop-up in March 2010 as part of a settlement following an earlier EU competition investigation.

But the US company dropped the feature in a Windows 7 update in February 2011.

Microsoft said the omission had been the result of a "technical error".

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21684329

This is just the EU, the US suits happened earlier.

To wit:

United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001)[1] is a noted American antitrust law case in which the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java. At trial, the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.

[brush]

43. Wouldn't it be quicker and safer to get doses from already...

up and running factories to India instead of going through the trial and error phase of setting up and testing that has to be done in building new factories?

[lonely bird]

2. Bill Gates has no interest in changing anything about the world economic system

Why does anyone ask Bill Gates anything about any subject beyond Microsoft? Amassing huge amounts of money does not automatically endow him with wisdom on a wide range of complex problems. I get that he has opinions, so do just about any other person on the planet, but paying obeisance to him or any other person just because of their wealth and “philanthropy” gives support to oligarchy.

[George II]

9. So tell me then, if he has "no interest in yadda yadda yadda", why has he given away...

...a half a TRILLION dollars in his life so far and pledged to eventually give away half his wealth?

[lonely bird]

19. You misunderstand

Giving away money is not the point.

The point is that the system which enabled him to amass wealth is also the system that causes the problems which makes his philanthropy possible. He has no interest in changing that system.

Political economy decides who gets what, where when, how and why. The current system prevalent in the U.S. as well as in vast majority of the rest of the world leads inexorably to inequality, poverty and, ultimately, to upheaval. Gates does not give a shit about changing the system.

[Hortensis]

47. No one would have any idea what he "gives a shit about" who refused

to consider any of the clues he gives, just hostile articles written by others that reinforce preexisting assumptions, themselves also likely built on rigid, cherrypicked notions pushed, again, by hostile third parties. Never him.

Notice what happened to the trumpists. According to them, we only want to destroy our nation, which is every bit as true as the notion Gates only cares about making money.

That's how they made themselves not just effectively crazy and self destructive, but profoundly ignorant and stupid.

[lonely bird]

54. Hmmm...

I recommend Winners Take All as well as Against Charity.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-the-wealth-gap-is-smaller-003850491.html

[Hortensis]

48. No one would have any idea what he "gives a shit about" who refused

to consider any of the clues he gives, just hostile articles written by others that reinforce preexisting assumptions, those also likely built on rigid, cherrypicked notions pushed, again, by mostly hostile third parties.

Notice what happened to the trumpists as they became radicalized. According to them, Democrats only want to destroy our nation (and maybe some to drink children's blood), which is every bit as true as the notion that Gates' big life is really only a tiny, bizarre, sick, evil obsession with making money, money, money.

Insisting on viewing all of us into similarly evil one-dimensional paper cutouts is how the trumpists made themselves not just effectively crazy and self destructive, but profoundly stupid and incapable of understanding anything.

[milestogo]

41. Bill Gates may be the most spectacularly self-educated man on the planet.

He has nothing to do with Microsoft any more.

[lonely bird]

42. Which is irrelevant

Self-educated means what, exactly? Many people read and read in depth on subjects. That does not make them experts.

His self-education does not change the point that he is uninterested in changing the system that causes inequality.

[lagomorph777]

3. Governments can definitely incentivize licensing or other schemes to build more manufacturing.

I don't think it's smart to punish companies who have invested billions in the technology, and I say this as somebody with a generally dim view of Pharma.

[riversedge]

7. yes, I was thinking--all chip in build a humungous factory for vaccines.

[pimpbot]

5. We even have problems here in the USA producing vaccines

Look at the debacle in Baltimore with the J&J vaccine. The company wasted tons of supplies and manpower because of lax standards. FDA shut the place down.

I'm not sure what people want done. If a manufacturer provides the instructions on how to make the vaccine, who exactly is setup to produce it? Who gets in trouble if there is an issue?

In hindsight, planning and capacity upgrades should have happened in 2020, in anticipation of vaccine development. However I'm not sure if the manufacturing process is unique to each one and if it would have been possible to build stockpiles of the basic ingredients without knowing the final product.

I don't know why the USA has been able to secure so many doses while other countries haven't. Contracts? Distribution? I'm all for helping others but we need to make sure everyone that wants it here at home has access as well.

[-misanthroptimist]

6. Human beings are always far down the list of concerns of the money addicts.

Processes, systems, interconnections, etc. are always far more important. Always.

[George II]

8. People are just getting too selective on how they read things. It's almost like they want to turn...

...just about anything they read into a negative.

Bill Gates has probably done more for the world as an individual as anyone in history. He's contributed more than $500B to various causes over the years. I don't see anything wrong with what he said. It's essentially the basis of our FDA - people can't just produce something they call "vaccines" and give them to people without proper manufacturing processes and extensive testing.

What is wrong with this statement?

The thing that's holding "things back" in terms of the global vaccine rollout, continued Gates, "is not intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you've got to do the trial on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way."

As far as turning a positive into a negative, yesterday during a discussion of Biden's first 100 days, CNN had a graphic that said to the effect (I didn't get the exact wording down)

Biden exceeds his goals of 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days, and even double that (200 shots), but falls short of his final objective!!

Can you believe that? It's as though his 100 and 200 million shots well ahead of schedule were a failure.

[Wingus Dingus]

10. Yup, looking for outrage material and finding none here.

[3825-87867]

12. Yeah, it's ok for the media to criticize every little thing Dems do,

but god forbid they say ANYTHING bad about Republicans - ever!

It seems as though they think Biden has a magic wand and isn't using it ALL the time. You know, if he had one, we could have him wave it and make 74 million problems disappear - starting with at least 270 in D.C. Congress, many more in local and state governments and at least a thousand in big business.

PLUS - one big PITA that contributed more to the decline of America in 4 years than all the Wars and Problems of the World in 250!

Hey media! GFY!

[JohnSJ]

29. Some are always looking for an excuse to bash Bill Gates.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-health/malaria

[The Mouth]

38. How much have *any* of the people criticizing him about this done

for their fellow humans?

[modrepub]

44. I'll Take American Capitalists

over the Russian Oligarchy system every day. At least our mega rich seem to understand there are limits to their gluttony.

[Humanist_Activist]

49. American Capitalists are just better at optics at the moment...

and tread the line of being completely undemocratic, rather than crossing it.

[Humanist_Activist]

53. "Bill Gates has probably done more for the world as an individual as anyone in history."

First off, debatable, and second off, how?

That's the crux of it, he has so many resources that he has an outsized influence worldwide, influence that he never earned, I might add.

Also, I'll tell you what's wrong with that statement, he's assuming that developing nations, such as India or many in the "Global South" are incapable of building facilities capable of reproducing these vaccines. Why is that?

[LPBBEAR]

11. Gates has always been this way.

Many of his so called "donations" were tied to Microsoft and its products. His company destroyed many more innovative products and technologies. He has always been a big proponent of intellectual property over world wide standards for example Microsoft working against the Open Document format to force Microsoft Office proprietary document formats into government offices and public institutions.
He may at times seem to be progressive but don't be fooled. He is not.

[3825-87867]

13. His company destroyed many more innovative products and technologies

Please provide some examples of this. We'll wait.

[Submariner]

14. Gates has the history of being very underhanded with software

developers of the 70s/80s....spreadsheet design....video software, etc. When I see his philanthropy today, I wonder if he does some of it out of guilt for screwing so many competitors out of their dreams of success.

This link will get you started. There is a lot more on the google.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+screwed+excel+spreadsheet+inventor&client=safari&rls=en&ei=oiKIYKWtLq-XwbkP4OmHoAY&oq=bill+gates+screwed+excel+spreadsheet+inventor&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAxQAFgAYIPAAWgAcAB4AIABhgSIAYYEkgEDNS0xmAEAqgEHZ3dzLXdpesABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwilhoCU1J7wAhWvSzABHeD0AWQQ4dUDCA0

[LPBBEAR]

36. Here is a few

Small list of companies destroyed by Microsoft either directly or indirectly. There are many more than this. Do a Google on some computer history.

BeOS
Xandros
Lindows
Suse
Corel

The whole Caldera/SCO saga that involved behind the scenes manipulation by Microsoft when Darl McBride was claiming they owned Unix and Linux and was trying to sue it out of existence including suing IBM. The ghost of this resurfaces every so often and did so again recently.

BeOS was especially heinous and involved Gates and Jobs pushing BeOS out of position as an Apple OS and other crap. BeOS later sued Microsoft and won but too late for consumers to enjoy it.

Corel involved Microsoft buying up about 25% of its stock, forcing its CEO out and later dumping that stock. Word Perfect was a far superior Office Productivity suite compared to MS Office at the time. Buh bye Word Perfect.

Just do some Googling for the sordid details and more.

[LPBBEAR]

37. A Little History.....

Lesson.

http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

[slightlv]

40. Remember Harvard Graphics?

It was THE go to for business. Now, all you find is Power point Slides

You guys are all talking about the big businesses... but there were lots of little businesses that got ate up my Microsoft - to be "integrated" into Windows... like anti-virus, and snip and clip (or whatever it's called). I lived thru all that, as well as the many versions of windows before it was truly "Windows". Anyone Remember Windows 286? There was another gui OS at that time (can't remember the name) that beat windows 286 hands-down. Now, it's long gone and forgotten.

[LovingA2andMI]

17. Exactly!!!

He has always been a big proponent of intellectual property over world wide standards for example Microsoft working against the Open Document format to force Microsoft Office proprietary document formats into government offices and public institutions.

VERY TRUE!!!

While forwarding shitty software prone to viruses of all kinds in Window 95, NT and 7.

People's minds are so short and easily fooled. Maybe those folks stating Gates is not too far from the rumors of saying aligning with depopulations goals of HIS -- were not that far off after all.

Only if one listens, they will hear the truth every now that then.

[LovingA2andMI]

15. Ole' the Bill Gates....

"Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done—moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India—it's novel—it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."

Umm....where have the word NOVEL been heard before. Wonder where?

Also, why is a person who could not keep viruses out of Windows 95, NT, 7 now sits like the King of Vaccine development due to buying stock in a Cancer Research Company (Moderna-pre entering the Vaccine Market) and controlling the WHO with GAVI?

One of these days, maybe, just maybe some will see Gates for who he is. Maybe.

[oldsoftie]

22. I see a guy who funded what would end up saving millions of children's lives in Africa.

The Gates initiative was and is largely responsible for that dealing with malaria.
Why compare a computer "virus" to a REAL virus? A computer virus will piss you off & may cost you money; a real one may kill you.

[LovingA2andMI]

26. We all have eyes....

To see different things. Kind of works just that way. Have a wonderful afternoon.

[Humanist_Activist]

50. Please remove the rose tinted glasses, damn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Reception_and_reforms

[oldsoftie]

55. Please live in the real world. From your link:

"The foundation has donated more than $6.6 billion for global health programs, including over $1.3 billion donated as of 2012 on malaria alone, greatly increasing the dollars spent per year on malaria research.[118][119] Before the Gates efforts on malaria, malaria drugmakers had largely given up on producing drugs to fight the disease, and the foundation is the world's largest donor to research on diseases of the poor.[119] With the help of Gates-funded vaccination drives, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000.[120]"

Deaths dropped NINETY PERCENT. I think the "unintended consequences" are also splitting hairs when it comes to their success in keeping people alive. But then theres always SOMETHING to bitch about with any project.

[Humanist_Activist]

56. From the source of my link...

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2007-dec-16-la-na-gates16dec16-story.html

Not saying that he hasn't done something, especially with helping to distribute established vaccines to areas that desperately need them, but, as this article shows, there are limits to how effective private philanthropy combined with international aid is without giving people in these areas opportunities to create sustainable infrastructure, both political and medical.

[oldsoftie]

57. Yes, there are limits. But its still far better than what WAS being done.

There MUST be restrictions and limits on implementation for real progress to be made.
Giving money to corrupt governments accomplishes nothing.
At least they're spending billions trying to help; compared to so many other billionaires.

[Humanist_Activist]

58. But that wasn't the largest issue highlighted in the article I linked...

Its the narrow focus of the funding, on top of the amount of funding having unintended consequences for the populations they ostensibly are trying to help. Perversely, those nations/areas that receive the most funding don't see a drop in child or maternal mortality, and sometimes it rises. Where, how, and by what means the money is spent matter just as much, if not more, than what they are focusing on.

Its a top down, ultimately undemocratic way of trying to fund healthcare through private means, while simultaneously claiming to not be doing that.

[DENVERPOPS]

32. Didn't Trump

award the "NOVEL" peace prize to some business person for screwing everyone in the country during the Pandemic?????????????

LOLOLOLOLOL

[OnlinePoker]

18. There would be no Covid vaccine without patent protection

No company is going to spend the multi-millions it requires to research and develop a vaccine if they, then, have to give that information to other companies.

[speak easy]

20. He is right.

It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines.

is exactly correct. AstraZeneca's vaccine is has been made available without royalties. How many new factories have been set up in Africa? None, because it takes a lot of time, money and regulatory expertise. How much more time, money and regulatory expertise would it take to set up highly specialized mRNA manufacturing capacity.

It's not IP that is holding the vaccine rollout out - it's vaccine manufacturing, and that won't be solved this year or next year. Period.

[oldsoftie]

21. He's right. And Tara Van Ho is putting words into his mouth.

Maybe she should look at all the lives that have been saved by the malaria vaccine initiatives in Africa.

Let one factory produce a vaccine that has a serious flaw that ends up killing a bunch of people & the whole world would be up in arms about it. Not to mention setting back vaccines in public opinion.
he's looking at the big picture. His critics are not.

[marble falls]

23. So in Bill Gate's mind intellectual rights trump personal rights to equal access and protections.

[DBoon]

28. His billions were made from intellectual property rights

Without these rights, Microsoft's initial product, software, would have been freely copied and hence would generate little revenue.

Compare Gates' wealth to the much more modest wealth of Linus Torvalds, whose software creation was specifically intended to be freely copied.

Of course Gates will always defend intellectual property.

[Humanist_Activist]

51. Correction, he made his billions by being related to someone who worked at IBM...

His mom, and possibly violating copyrights on certain versions of BASIC and CPM. The rest, we shall say, are history.

[peppertree]

24. Go tell that to these people, Bill

Many of whom have worked for you.

[packman]

25. Remember Dr. Salk (Polio) and Dr. Banting (insulin)

Two who refused to profit from their work - I think Banting would not approve of what happened to his discovery

[LovingA2andMI]

27. Yes....

It used to work, just that way. Now, Billionaires who control things are upheld as heroes. Welcome to 2021.

[elleng]

30. 'it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."'

No sh*t, sherlock.

[Warpy]

34. As much as he wants praise for his philanthropy, he's still a businessman

and businessmen lack the perspective that brings us together to share what we have freely in an emergency.

This is such an emergency. Companies can chase their patents later, new people coming along will need vaccination. Right now, that's inappropriate. Companies will be paid, mostly by governments, but they won't make the killing a patent will give them.

That's the difference, Bill, think Jonas Salk. Had he pursued a patent, you might be suffering the lifelong aftereffects of polio--if you lived through it. Same situation.

[ananda]

39. "To equate judgment and wisdom with occupation is insulting."

...

[Deep State Witch]

45. Make those 5G tracking chips faster, Bill!

We all know that Micro$oft is holding up the vaccine process because they're not cranking out those tracking chips!

[Hortensis]

46. I'll listen to Bill Gates any time. He's not just a very decent man

but a very knowledgeable one. His statement does not have to be agreed entirely with, but maybe resentful rejection should be withheld until after thinking carefully about and comprehending what he's explaining.

[Humanist_Activist]

52. 21st Century "White Man's Burden" all for everyone to see...

I gotta love the assumption that people in the developing world are simply incapable of manufacturing any of these vaccines on their own, even with technical assistance.