Bill Gates and India - The Gates Foundation's Living Laboratory

In a recent interview, the world's foremost untrained virologist and vaccinologist "accidentally" said the quiet part out loud.  In an interview with Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, Bill Gates waxed philosophically about his views on AI and how it will help transform all of Bill's favourite things including global health, climate change, energy and education.  Here is a quote from the lead-in to the Possible podcast:

 

"Reid and Aria sat down with Bill Gates to discuss his main areas of focus: climate change, energy, global health, and education—and how AI will help transform each of them. Taking a bird’s-eye view of society’s challenges, it’s easy to give in to pessimism. But as one of the most influential people in the world, Bill Gates has a unique perspective on how far humanity has come and what our potential—and timelines—for meaningful change really look like. He gets granular on everything from cows (5% of global emissions) to disease reduction and eradication (Guinea worm disease). At each turn, he has data at his fingertips to ground his beliefs. So, what current set of innovations is Bill most excited about? And what is realistically on the horizon for AI, climate change, energy, global health, and education?"

  

With that background, let's look at an excerpt from the hour-long interview.  Co-host Aria Finger, Hoffman's Chief of Staff, leads in with this when opening the discussion about Bill's fixation with global health:

 

"So I want to switch gears. Another area where I think you’re probably best known is global health. And I think as an area where AI can do so much, and my husband is a public health data scientist, so he’s particularly excited about this area of the interview. You have focused on the eradication of disease. And I think, but fact, check me, in 1980, the WHO declared that smallpox was eradicated. And that’s the first and only disease that we have eradicated. You’ve said let’s tackle polio, let’s tackle malaria. How do you pick, what is the next disease you’re going to tackle? Like what an amazing ambition and then how do you go after it?"

 

Gates responds with this with my bolds throughout:

 

"Yeah, so most diseases we’re going for a burden reduction. Only very few diseases should you try to go for eradication. because It’s very, very hard to get to zero. And right now with polio, you know, we’re in Afghanistan, we’re in Gaza, we’re in Somalia, we’re in DRC, and you know, we’re having to execute high coverage vaccination campaigns against misinformation and violence in the toughest places in the world. So it’s very, very hard. Polio’s close. There’s one called Guinea worm, which is confined to Africa where, you know, President Carter just got to a hundred, he’s been a, a champion of that. So we’re hoping he’ll be alive not only to vote in the election, but also to come to the Guinea worm celebration party. He’s going to, it’s going to take a couple years. So he’s going to have to hang on a little longer. So the magic thing that happened at the turn of the century was people got serious about global health, about really measuring, okay, kids die of diarrhea, but what caused that diarrhea?

 

They die of pneumonia, malaria, okay, it’s more clear what that is. But let’s, even though there’s no market, the people who die of malaria, half a million kids a year, they, it’s not like you can make a business case of, hey, go to Silicon Valley and do a malaria startup. And, you know, look at that spreadsheet the line that says life saved will look good, but the line that says profit will have a lot of red numbers because you, they can’t afford these tools. So medical science is very distorted towards rich world conditions and even amongst rich world conditions towards cancer and a few other things. So the incentive system is, you know, potentially could be improved. But the Gates Foundation, that’s our place we come to fill in, is that the things that aren’t market driven, like getting diarrhea vaccines cheap enough for all the kids of the world, not just the rich kids who don’t die of diarrhea, but the, the, that also used to be a half million now down to a hundred thousand.

 

So as we went from 10 million under five deaths per year in the, at the turn of the century to 5 million, diarrhea was one of our best. Pneumonia, we got a vaccine out for that, which was a very expensive vaccine that we worked with all the vaccine companies, Western and Asian, to get those prices down. And so we’re kind, we’re basically driven by the inequity where we say, why do mothers die in childbirth 20 times as much in Africa? Why do kids die 50 times as much in their first five years in poor countries, particularly Africa, but also Southeast Asia. And so we’re, you know, taking all of those and saying, okay, let’s find the best scientists. Let’s understand the field conditions, you know, is this stuff deliverable? Will it be accepted? You know, we have crazy ways of killing mosquitoes — that, that alone doesn’t get rid of malaria."

 

Crazy is right as you can see here:

...and here:

So now Bill's an entomologist too!  Absolutely nothing could go wrong by changing the mosquito ecosystem, could it?

 

Now, if we skip to the end of the interview, we find this gem during the rapid-fire question and answer section:

 

"REID:

 

Yeah, exactly. I love it. So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry — and of course that’s very broad — that inspires you?

 

BILL GATES:

 

Well, when India’s an example of a country where, oh, there’s plenty of things that are difficult there. The health nutrition education is improving, and they’re stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it’s very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off. And it’s kind of a laboratory to try things that then once you prove them out in India, you can take to other places. And so our biggest non-U.S. Office for the Foundation is in, is in India. And the most number of pilot rollout things we’re doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. You know, if you go there and you’ve never been, you might think, whoa, this is a chaotic place. And you know, you’re not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at, at the same time, but you, you will get a sense of the vibrancy. Mm-Hmm."

  

Here it is as seen at the 1 hour and 1 minute mark of the video:

 

 

So, there you go.

 

As background, here's what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has to say about its work in India:

 

 

If you search through the Foundation's committed grants database using India as a search term, you'll find that the Foundation has written 884 grants to India in total.  Here are a few examples from the month of November 2024:

 

 

In the month of November 2024 alone, the Foundation wrote 49 grants to various organizations and projects in India.  By year, we find that the Foundation has written 130 grants in 2024, 122 grants in 2023, 79 grants in 2022, 79 grants in 2021, 50 grants in 2020 and 61 grants in 2019 to various studies that appeal to Bill Gates' sense of what he wants the world to be.  

  

Bill Gates views India as a test tube for his health care agenda.  This can only be described as exploitation by the world's wealthy elite at the expense of the unwashed masses who are viewed as lesser forms of life to be used to enrich the ruling class.  Apparently, brown lives just aren't worth caring about when it comes to Gatesworld.  In the end, it's always about profiteering in the guise of philanthropy.