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Comment by codebolt | Hacker News Reader

Like it or not, he's become a highly controversial figure for a large fraction of the population, particularly within the societies that his foundation works. In my opinion, they'd do good to pick a figure whose name is less tarnished if they want the message to be more broadly accepted.

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That's an interesting claim. Pretty much every piece of negative opinion of Gates I've seen have either been

1. About his work at Microsoft

2. Or some conspiracy theory about world domination, population control etc

I'd be interested to read more on how societies he's directly worked with think of him, if you have any links

It has to do with Gates' vaccine program in India. Here is a paper you can read. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30111741/

Not a paper, but perhaps worth reading, is this article, which discusses other conflict of interest accusations. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/bio...

The point of this article appears to be that the Gates foundation simultaneously promotes vaccination and helps pharmaceutical companies with their vaccine research. While that is technically a conflict of interest...it's not much of one. They do both of those things vaccines because vaccines save millions of lives per year.

It'd be like saying it's a conflict of interest to promote access to clean water, while also investing in companies that supply clean water. Sure. It's a conflict. It's also exactly what you would do if you just wanted people to have clean water.

I'm not interested in digging up the information on this because it was over 10 years ago, so take it with a huge grain of salt.

He had this huge presentation about a laser zapping mosquitoes. The patent was fed to a patent troll, the whole board was stacked with his friends, the company produced nothing and was set up to sue anyone who did try and produce anything. 10 years later they still haven't produced more than the one prototype. The 'charitable' donations were literally just tax write offs that paid for his friends salary.

Since then I really don't take him seriously at all. His charities are just a way to reduce his tax bill and look like he cares, while he's just paying his friends to work on projects they find interesting regardless of the chance of success.

In short: hubris, corruption, white collar rico and tax evasion.

I think his biggest mistake is that he's focused so much on two issues that make it easy to paint him in a negative light. If I was a native Nigerian and some rich white guy started building abortion centres and injecting people with needles all over my country it would be easy to become skeptical.

If I were in his shoes I'd focus more on issues like education, improving basic utilities in urban areas, fighting corruption and enabling economies to expand.

there is also

3 : he wants to use his money for philanthropic cause. I can't overstate how great it is. The way he uses his money though, has been pretty controversial. From pushing a pro patent agenda in countries that are too poor to afford medicine made under that system to accusations of straight up using his money so his ideas are applied, even when they go against actual experts with data (and actual expertise) to back their positions.

For the lazy, there was a recent video on the topic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-fqcFaZKHQ

No matter who you put forth saying what Gates has been saying, they will quickly be tarnished by the same baseless bullshit. Effectively 0% of people knew who Facui or Birx were before the pandemic. Now they're the target of the same kind of controversy.

Maybe zero young people but I’d say well informed middle age and up would know who Facui is. It’s hard to debate this with a source but these people have even in the news for decades when things go wrong. I disagree with the “effective 0%”

I’m a allegedly well-educated well-over-30s person, didn’t know who either of them were.

Here is the google trends data from Fauci.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Gosh down votes for this

Okay let me try to show my side of “0%“ is wrong”

“author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks.“

“Dr. Fauci ranked 7th out of more than 1.8 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2020.”

Note this isn’t just 2020. It’s a long history.

“Dr. Fauci was appointed director of NIAID in 1984.” And has served under 6 presidents. Most of which had more than 1 term.

If you are looking for a long list of awards and honorary doctorates head over to his Wikipedia page.

To the replies I got - I don’t consider 30’s middle aged. I guess I was thinking if you were around with AIDS news in the 80’s you might remember him. Oxford dictionary considers middled aged 45-65 - google trending searches isn’t how I would evaluate the history of someone over decades of time.

For fun I did fin a bunch of videos of times he was on TV via YouTube. So again my point is that 0% is far from right.

Effectively 0% of people knew Anthony Fauci?

It’s the same mechanism over and over. If I say something on a blog or newspaper like : “user Creato makes apps that make people dumber”

It is you who have to go on the defensive, especially if it gets spread far and wide, regardless if it is true or not. But the lie is out there and your truth has to catch up.

I think if someone was gay and or dealt with HIV in some form, they likely heard of Dr Fauci. Researchers definitely know who is. From his CDC bio: “In a 2020 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 41st most highly cited researcher of all time. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 7th out of more than 1.8 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2020.”

Right, that's no one, statistically speaking. In particular, the people calling for Fauci's family to be harmed are not in the group you mentioned.

But Gates is controversial because of the work he did that make him a qualified source, so it's not unlikely that any reasonable alternative would also have their name "tarnished".

So... do you keep picking new spokespeople when each one becomes unreasonably tarnished?

Because each and every person who promotes public health and (particularly) vaccination, eventually has so much baseless shit thrown at them that they become 'tarnished' before long.

Or should we try to make some sort of stand, and let the wingnuts know their opinions don't matter?

We see the effects of this sort of compromise in the vaccine space - perfectly safe additives were removed in an effort to assuage fears, but that action was twisted into a victory by antivax campaigners - "see, we were right, it was harmful, they lied, we forced them to remove it".

(Gates is tarnished in my eyes for computer industry reasons, but I have no issue with his record in public health)

So, the Heckler's Veto, then?

Makes no difference. Ohio had Amy Acton, a medical doctor who specialized in public health. She did a great job but the right wing nutcases still sent her and her family death threats to the point where she was forced to resign.

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