THIS is the latest summary about the Gates Foundation, which is a large body of philanthro-capitalism, i.e. making money while making it appear like philanthropy. We will try to make this a weekly-occurring type of post. This latest post will explain how Bill Gates uses new ventures to increase his power and his wealth while the public usually views him as a national or international hero. Everything in this post is based on the past week's news, so readers can verify with the original sources and decide for themselves.
"It's really a combination of all of this together," said Diane Troyer, a former Houston-area community college president who's a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "It adds up to a situation that now is getting really strong national attention. I think for the first time we really have the light shone upon this in a way that's going to make a difference."
Although New York was named a Race to the Top grant finalist this month by the U.S. Department of Education, how the department scored the application and the amount of funding that may be coming New York's way are still unknown.
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According to the Associated Press, 14 finalists, including New York, received grants of up to $250,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to hire consultants to help construct their applications. Delaware and South Carolina were the only two finalists that did not use Gates Foundation funding.
Athens, Ga. - Dr. Julie Jacobson from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Global Health Program will be the featured speaker for the next "Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard" lecture on Tuesday, March 23 at 6 p.m. in the University of Georgia Chapel.
Taking Gates for a spin
It's hardly Gatesgate, but it does beg a key question.
Why does the School District of Hillsborough County need to spend $375,000 on an outside public relations firm to explain the $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the public -- and to its 17,000 teachers? The district has its own staff of communications specialists. If this doesn't fall within its purview, priorities or skill set, something's wrong.
"We don't have time to do PR," communications director Steve Hegarty told the Tribune.
We're told that the Gates folks were adamant in putting a premium on communicating what's entailed in its seven-year commitment to change how county teachers are recruited, trained and paid. Of course, they want this explained effectively. Nine-figure overhauls require no less. But they never demanded it be put out for bid.
A report recently published by Public Agenda/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/theirwholelivesaheadofthem.pdf) reveals the reality of the guidance received by high school graduates who are college-bound. It doesn't reflect well on our state of affairs at the national level, but it does shed some light on the fact that students need help. More students are dropping out of college than are graduating. And this can be avoided.
Rajiv is on a roll. In his new role, is it any surprise that he prioritises Gates Foundation priorities on a visit to Seattle?
Mason and Albrecht were two of nine journalists whose fellowships in global health reporting were supported over three years by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, the global health grants have expired, but the significant impact of their work affirms the Nieman Foundation’s commitment to this effort.
Butler-Jones and Aglukkaq both said the funding that was to go the facility is still going to the CHVI and the government and the Gates Foundation are discussing how it will now be used.
Butler-Jones said he could not say when a decision will be made.
The CHVI was created in February 2007 as a joint venture of Canada and the Gates Foundation. Ottawa put up $111 million and Gates $28 million.
The HIV-vaccine facility was supposed to be the centrepiece of the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative but it was cancelled last month when the government said none of the proponents met the criteria and a study by the Gates Foundation said such a facility was no longer needed.
A new report from a Canadian vaccine expert pours water on the Harper government's argument a non-profit HIV vaccine manufacturing facility is no longer needed, opposition critics charged Thursday.
Ron Gerson, president of vaccine manufacturer PnuVax and a pharmaceutical and vaccine industry consultant, critiqued a study from the Gates Foundation, which was one of the main reasons Canada shelved its plans to build a manufacturing facility.
Gerson, who was involved in initial reviews of bids for the facility, called the Gates study "fatally flawed" because it looked only at the quantity of manufacturers available to produce HIV vaccines for clinical trials, not the quality of their work.
He said at the same time the Gates Foundation, Canada's partner on CHVI, produced a study which says there is now sufficient capacity available in existing facilities to produce enough research vaccines for use in clinical trials.
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She dismissed the Gates study, saying it was always known there was capacity to produce vaccines but there is a difference in having private-sector versus non-profit capacity.
"After weighing all of the evidence, the Government of Canada and the Gates Foundation have decided not to proceed with the pilot-scale vaccine manufacturing facility," says the notice.
The facility would have been the main project in the $111-million Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, a venture between Canada and the Gates Foundation that was announced three years ago.
Microsoft Canada Inc. announced today it is working with local open government experts and Vancouver-based developer Nitobi, to help make government data more easily accessible and useful for citizens. Leveraging the City of Vancouver's Open Data catalogue and Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative : (OGDI) platform, Nitobi has developed VanGuide : , a web and mobile based social mapping application that enables citizens to tag, rate and comment on Vancouver landmarks and locations.
A global vaccine initiative launched with the help of Bill Gates is seeking $4.3 billion in new funding to ramp up child immunization campaigns against deadly diseases such as hepatitis B, diarrhea and pneumonia in the developing world.
The Geneva-based GAVI alliance, launched a decade ago as a partner of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said governments and other donors could help save 4.2 million lives if they meet the funding demands through 2015.
Bill Gates Can't Do it Alone
Next week GAVI's donors will sit together in the Netherlands and consider new pledges to support GAVI's work. Many will no doubt be looking to the Gates Foundation, which recently announced $10 billion in funding for vaccine research, development, and delivery over the next 10 years to fix this problem. But in this case, Bill Gates is just not rich enough to fill this gap on his own. Other donors must step up and help to fill the breach as well.
“It turns out now that Gates takes a leading role alongside the FDA (which he is also connected to through Monsanto) in the TB Alliance.”A very recent study showed that most news is simply PR (about 60% of it), which means it's pushed or ghostwritten by PR people. Here again is Huffington spinning Microsoft's collaboration with suppressive regimes last week. We wrote about this earlier, omitting the unnecessary spin. There is something increasingly sickening about what Huffington is doing, maybe because it's desperate for revenue so it puts PR before investigative reporting.
Earlier this month we wrote about Microsoft's new hire from the FDA, which will help the company lobby the government. It turns out now that Gates takes a leading role alongside the FDA (which he is also connected to through Monsanto) in the TB Alliance. Gates was accused of monopolising research in these areas.
The companies will attend regular meetings led by the Gates Foundation and the TB Alliance, and researchers will work with the FDA to determine which combinations should be tested and how the trials should proceed, Stoffels said.
FDA Looks to Streamline Rules for New Drug Cocktails
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Two pharmaceutical consortia want to use the new approach, the article says. One is a group of 10 drug companies and several nonprofit organizations convened by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop medicines to fight tuberculosis. The other is an effort by Merck and AstraZeneca, which are jointly testing two anticancer agents. Others may be interested as well.
At least two pharmaceutical consortia are poised to take advantage of the forthcoming policy: a group of 10 drug companies and several nonprofit organizations convened by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop medicines to fight tuberculosis; and pharmaceutical giants Merck & Co. and AstraZeneca PLC, which are jointly testing two anticancer agents.
Q: Some say the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the WHO.
A: On the contrary that is what we really want -- contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies. We need to have political support, but it doesn't give us all that we need. NGOs and philanthropies and many foundations such as Bill Gates Foundation -- they're taking a very important role. The United Nations stands in the center of mobilizing and raising awareness of climate change and food security. When this H1N1 flu broke out I immediately had a meeting with WHO Director Margaret Chan. We even convened a meeting with international pharmaceutical CEOs in Geneva. We were discussing how pharmaceutical companies could help providing vaccines for developing countries. Major pharmaceutical companies have now donated 150 million vaccines.
But that's exactly the point, says Todd Barker, a partner for the Meridian Institute, which organized the trip with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
--AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)
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your_friend
2010-03-23 13:44:39