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George Parker wrote: > God bless you Bill and Melinda. Worth reading to the end. > > http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/the_gates_foundations_leverage.html Sounds like sour grapes. If the foundation have investments in multinationals that aren't supporting their goal, it is probably they have a lot of money to invest, and need to improve on the diligence. But let's face it if Gates had invested only in companies in the "FTSE for Good" say, the returns wouldn't have help his charitable goals much either. The vaccine finance issue is a big one. Want a vaccine against Lymes' Disease? You can't buy it because it isn't economic to produce it. It exists, is licensed in the US, it just isn't made. Despite plenty of people getting Lymes' disease. The DOD struggled to get someone to produce a vaccine they use to use to stop recruits dropping out of their training program with chest infections. For a while they had a bounty offered to encourage a manufacture to come back and make the vaccine. I think the sums are put in perspective when the WHO spends less then $1 billion to get more than 2 billion vaccine doses. It is chicken feed in terms of International development, we probably spend more on doomed IT project each year than the cost of 2 billion vaccinations. We know how to vaccinate against a wider range of diseases than we do. Vaccines are the single most effective type of medicine. The vaccine spend is minute compared to the benefits vaccines bring. So it would appear to be ripe for expansion (scientifically if not politically). So Gates is probably right to be focused on the economic disconnect here. We probably do need to produce economic incentives and guarantees of some sort to boost the vaccine business. Particularly on diseases affecting poor people in poor countries, since they are the least attractive markets with the largest potential benefits in terms of health benefits. If shuffling a few 10's of million extra of government cash to a few vaccine makers with the right guarantees in place is sufficient to achieve this, then they are almost certainly doing the right thing. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq