Hacker News Reader

Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.

View on HN

Helping to cure polio doesn't outweigh imagined future harms by George engineering that didn't happen yet?

He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine.

This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.

Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.

Plus, he wouldn't touch a project he couldn't make a profit from somehow.

People don't change much.

Yup, the Gates worship is incredibly sad.

I don't get how it happened, it's like an epidemic on this site.

It's not like it takes a lot of effort to find out the truth about that scumbag.

How does he profit from giving away all of his money?

Dig deep enough and there's always a kickback, some business he's involved in that profits one way or the other.

Do you have any examples?

No, I don't collect these things, I prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about Bill Gates.

But everything you could possibly want to know is a Google search away.

I tried to find something but couldn't find any evidence that he's received a kickback for any charity

Right, and what did you search for if I may ask?

This took me about three clicks to find:

https://cagj.org/2020/04/the-nation-bill-gatess-charity-para...

Which sounds more like the BG I know from back in the days.

> He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus

Wow. Just wow. Where the heck do you get this garbage from?

OPV unfortunately does cause paralytic polio disease indirectly by infecting unvaccinated people. It's worth it IMO because the total number of paralyzed people has decreased, but in the long term we have to switch to IPV to completely eliminate polio. This will take decades and many billions of dollars though.

Yes, it's called cVDPV. It's caused by the virus in the live vaccine "unweakening" itself, and it's typically happening in people with weakened immune systems (e.g. from chronic malnutrition). It's not causing unvaccinated people to get infected, per se.

Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.

But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.

We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.

I largely agree, but there is essentially no possibility of ever eradicating polio with the current OPV strategy.

If you stop vaccinating, cVDPV will spread person to person. Some people carry virus for decades and it can become infectious at any time, many years after they were first vaccinated or infected. There will sparse but significant episodes until all humans who were vaccinated with OPV (or infected with the wild virus) have died.

but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it! It's ok if we don't eradicate the virus. The point is to prevent children from being paralyzed, and it works for that.

Unfortunately, if you look at the situation with type 2, you will see what happens when OPV stops too early (and type 2 is a much less aggressive disease than type 1). In a perfect world, OPV cessation happens in most healthy communities rather soon, while the people who are in need of a much stronger vaccine continue to get OPV.

Also, Gates's pet project of a novel OPV has been shown to have caused a few confirmed cases of VAPP now, so it seems that project won't save OPV.

Essentially the best hope for eradicating polio within 20 years seems to be giving out a lot of OPV to places like Afghanistan and the DRC and forcing the local warlord to give it to the kids who need it (the latter has generally been a total failure of the Gates project). Once OPV gets wild-type and cVDPV outbreaks under control, a global switch to IPV seems safe to prevent future outbreaks. But, to get there, it seems a very aggressive OPV campaign is necessary compared to where we are now. It may take a militarized organization to do this, also, given the fact that you necessarily have to deal with tribal warlords. Shame we don't have USAID any more...

We aren't going to do that because it seems we generally aren't capable of doing that. So we're likely stuck with a decent amount of polio for a long time.

cVDPV outbreaks die out on their own, and the newer vaccines are designed to be less likely to escape.

People also don't carry the virus for decades. That's a myth. People with a weakened immune system can get infected with polio even after a childhood vaccination, so that's probably where this myth comes from.

It's not a myth at all, off the top of my head I know of at least two cases studies including the study that led to the discovery that remdesivir may treat polio

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022663/

Immunocompromised hosts can shed infectious polio for their entire lives.

These outbreaks sometimes die on their own, but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't spread widely if we completely stopped vaccinating

There are issues with the oral vaccines, but what you're saying is completely untrue. The total number of paralyzed kids has gone down dramatically as a result of the work Gates has done. By any metric, this is a good thing

Forgive me if I find it somewhat difficult to take seriously an argument by a person judging progress on the Kardashev scale...

You could pick some slightly less sci-fi measures like "number of trivially preventable deaths from diseases for which we have vaccines", for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com