The record of Microsoft’s multibillionaire founder Bill Gates is such that no matter what he does, people tend to look for a catch. Bill wouldn’t do it differently, is the assumption.
It is the same with the charitable foundation he has established to fund a global vaccination program. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, GAVI, is a five-year project set up in 1999 with $750 million of Gates Foundation money, which is also backed by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fun and the World Bank, who, with others, have committed the remainder of GAVI’s $1 billion total budget. The aim is to target hepatitis B, diphtheria and tetanus. The program has reached three million vaccinations a year. But suddenly this philanthropic act is drawing bitter criticism. The international charity, Save the Children, last fortnight launched an extraordinary attack upon the GAVI project. They have two main objections. The first is that the diseases targeted are the wrong diseases because they are not the most significant. The second is that the drugs being used are too expensive and create a dependency for poor countries, who will have to find money they cannot afford to maintain the inoculation program once GAVI funding comes to an end. Critics point out that the project’s board contains representatives of the big pharmaceutical companies. They further contend that this is a conflict of interest. They believe that it is the influence of these individuals that accounts for the adoption of the expensive drugs used in the inoculations. The immediate response to Save the Children’s criticisms from a representative of the Gates foundation was to admit that the charity had raised real issues that needed to be examined.
Unfortunately for Bill Gates, there are remarkable echoes in the tactics that appear to have been used at GAVI and the way that Microsoft itself has conducted it business. Microsoft has always been high-handed about its software, trying to shut out any lower-cost rivals, by building barriers into its operating systems and its suites of business programs. With a virtually captive audience in both the home and much of the corporate market, people who do not want to run with the rival Apple or UNIX-based systems have to do it the Microsoft way, thus pumping more billions into the Gates foundation.
The irony is that the Gates business methods are perhaps also being applied at GAVI. However, Bill Gates himself may not like it very much that benefiting countries are being told that they have to link in to a program using high-cost medicines which they will be hard pressed to afford once the program stops. What this would seem to guarantee is that when GAVI finishes, so too will much of the inoculation work it has pioneered. It could be argued that the expensive pharmaceuticals are incompatible with the problems they are designed to solve.
But incompatibility has been one of the defining marks of Microsoft which has made the company so rich. You need to buy upgrades all the time because programs are rarely backwardly compatible. Thus in a final irony, if you want to download GAVI’s latest report from its stylish website, you will be able to open and read it only if you have the very latest version of Microsoft Word.
