Prescription Drugs Or Food and Shelter?
© The U.S. Army
Over the past 10 years, the Microsoft co-founder's charity (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) has committed $4.5 billion to vaccines. Bill Gates promises $10 billion for vaccines to the third world. Should we provide food and shelter and not prescription drugs or vaccines?
Have you ever been in the Third World? I remember sitting on a bus in an Indonesian city. One of the other passengers asked me to hold their chicken for a few minutes. It was a live chicken in a little wooden cage. They needed to tend to a dirty toddler who was crying. I was grateful that it wasn't a goat…
If you've never traveled in the Third World, it's difficult to understand how ludicrous this question sounds. I'm not talking about tourism and resorts in Boracay or the Dominican Republican. I'm talking about holding someone else's chicken.
The issue is simple. The world needs visionaries. The Gates Foundation meets a need. It's a niche in the larger community of non-profit service organizations. And doing what they do is not a suggestion that people who do other stuff are somehow wrong. There has to be a larger vision – a vision to do both.
April 23rd, 2010 at 4:43 pm
thnaks for post, very good site