Gatescrashing democracy

Journalist Tim Schwab says his book probing the Gates Foundation is a case study for the larger problem of extreme wealth and how it threatens democracy

critical reporting on Gates published. But I do think it’s getting easier.

Q:Today a person with no public health background is arguably the most influential voice in global public health. Is this a cause for alarm or a happy coincidence, given the millions of lives he’s reportedly saved?

If you try to track down the evidence surrounding the millions of lives Gates is saving, you end up finding research that the foundation itself funded. This research, which is not independent, is telling you one side of the story. It’s not telling us how many lives were lost because of Gates’s wrongheaded strategies. During the pandemic, for example, there were widespread calls, led by India and South Africa, to waive

A:patents over COVID vaccines. Gates used his bully pulpit to challenge these calls, arguing that his foundation’s charitable partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry made a patent waiver unnecessary. But Gates’s charitable promise to deliver vaccine equity failed. What we saw instead was vaccine apartheid, as the poorest people on earth went to the back of the queue. Not surprisingly, there is no billionaire philanthropist funding research into how many lives were lost through Gates’s failed response effort.

It is true that Bill Gates has no formal training in most of the areas in which he works, whether it is pandemics or climate change or agriculture. His influence in world affairs only really makes sense if you believe that the richest guy deserves the loudest voice.

Q:Where does India figure in Gates’s scheme of things?

India is the largest destination of Gates Foundation funding — outside of the U.S. and Europe. One feature

A:The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire Tim Schwab

Penguin Business

that makes India so important to the foundation is its role as the socalled pharmacy of the world. Gates has sought out partnerships with Indian pharma to try to move lowcost drugs and vaccines into the poorest nations on earth. Much of Gates’s work in the pandemic, for example, hinged on a deal with the Serum Institute of India to produce vaccines for African nations. As a major wave of infections spread across India in early 2021, the government effectively issued an export ban, directing Serum’s shots into the arms of Indian citizens. That political decision was one reason Gates’s COVID response effort failed. But this episode also helps show how many of Gates’s philanthropic projects — globally — depend on Indian corridors of power, whether it is the private sector or the Modi administration.

Q:How would you contextualise Gates’s decision to give the prestigious Global Goalkeeper Award to Prime Minister Modi in 2019?

Gates gave the humanitarian award at a time when Modi’s administration was in the midst of an international PR crisis, facing widespread reports of human rights abuses in Kashmir. Though the news media doesn’t often raise criticism around the foundation, many outlets did with this episode. So it was a big PR blunder for the foundation on the world stage, but I think it was also a political calculation by Gates. In all the work the foundation does

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Tim Schwab