Why is he helping to pay for vaccines for poor countries?
“Markets alone won’t address the largest health inequities” 9 October 2002 By Pete Engardio, Edited by Patricia O’Connell In addition to guiding Microsoft’s new product strategy, one of Bill Gates’s chief preoccupations for the past few years has been the fight against infectious diseases in the developing world. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $750 million of the Vaccine Fund’s $1 billion war chest, which pays for vaccines against such diseases as hepatitis, measles, and polio for 53 of the world’s poorest nations. The foundation is also a major backer of the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization (GAVI), which many poverty experts regard as a promising new model for managing foreign aid and coordinating the activities of governments and donor agencies. GAVI was formed in response to stagnating global immunization rates and widening disparities in vaccine access among industrialized and developing countries, a problem that results in millions of people dying each
