Bill Gates’ vaccine-based giving is closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind.“A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.
He is using his the reputation, resources and determination to stamp out infectious disease. “I’d be deeply disappointed,” says Gates, if in the next 25 years he can’t lower the death toll by 80%. Otherwise, “we’re just not doing our job very ...Gates began consuming data that startled him. In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.
“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.
Here’s the truest definition of power: When you have the ability to not just solve a problem but also to create a sustainable market that addresses it. “There was nobody you could a write a check to,” remembers Gates, who stood ready a decade ago to buy billions of vaccine doses. In the 1980s Unicef had tripled the percentage of children who got basic vaccines for polio, diphtheria, tetanus and other diseases by corralling public funds, negotiating on price with other aid agencies and deploying thousands of aid workers to deliver them. But those efforts still fell woefully short of the need, and new medicines hitting the U.S. market faced an intolerable 15-to-20-year lag before reaching the kids of Tanzania or Nicaragua. “The chance of death from those diseases is 50 times greater in poor kids than in rich kids!” says Gates, his voice rising.
World Health Organization - Child mortality declined at 2.7% per year since 2000, twice as fast as during the 1990s (1.3%). Mortality among children under five years fell from 12.4 million in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2009.
