The present generation of mankind has been brought up with specific biases and personality cults. So, for an entire generation, big tech and mainstream media have postulated that Obama is one of the greatest US Presidents ever or that Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai is a great student activist. One such widely propagated perception is that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a legendary philanthropist.
But now with Bill’s shocking remarks about not sharing COVID-19 vaccine formulas with India and other developing nations, the perception of a legendary, billionaire philanthropist is getting demolished.
In a recent interview, Bill Gates was asked if it would help the current vaccine shortage if the Intellectual Property (IP) protections were lifted and other vaccine makers around the world were allowed to make those vaccines. Bill’s insensitive and blunt response was a “No”.
He tried to explain, “There’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India, it’s novel, it’s only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all.”
Salon reported that Bill Gates made these remarks in reference to the Serum factory in India, which is presently manufacturing Covishield- AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Anyhow, Bill Gates tried to explain further. He said that sharing a vaccine formula isn’t as simple as sharing a recipe, because the drug needs to be tried and tested, which in turn requires an extremely cautious manufacturing process.
Well, even we understand the difference between sharing a vaccine formula and sharing a simple recipe. But to suggest that things cannot work out in developing countries or that such countries cannot develop an efficacious manufacturing process is nothing short of plain racism and xenophobia.
The Microsoft founder also said, “The thing that’s holding things back, in this case, is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trial on these things. And every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”
If you are already surprised by what Gates said, you will be absolutely flummoxed by his comments about how developing countries will ultimately get the vaccines. He said that developing countries will get their hands on the vaccine, once the developed nations are done getting vaccinated.
Really? But what about the thousands who will die in developing countries, while developed countries wait to get sufficiently vaccinated? The scant regard to human life in developing nations is rather nauseating here.
Gates said, “The fact that now we’re vaccinating 30-year-olds in the UK and the US and we don’t have all the 60-year-olds in Brazil and South Africa vaccinated, that’s not fair, but within three or four months the vaccine allocation will be getting to all the countries that have the very severe epidemic.”
Yes, we agree- “that’s not fair”. However, anything which is followed by a compulsive “but” hardly makes any difference. The only conclusion one can arrive on is that Bill’s comments negating the right of India and other developing nations to vaccine jabs override years of liberal media propaganda about his philanthropy.
I have suspected him of wolf in a sheep’s skin back in 2015 and now he got exposed.
Americans with an average I.Q. less than 100 could hardly develop vaccines on their own. Behind every research, every path- breaking enterprise is an Indian brain (NASA, Google, even Microsoft, to quote a few). An Indian brain who was not given a chance in his own country, thanks to the curse of Reservation, which we are proudly carrying forward for the last 70 years.