Bill Gates Says Anti-Vaccine Effort Kills Children 832
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN has an interesting interview with Bill Gates who says that unbelievable progress is being made in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them. The improvements could cut the number of children who die every year from about 9 million to half that. But Gates has harsh words for those who engage in anti-vaccine efforts, especially Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who falsified data to 'prove' a fraudulent link between vaccines and autism. 'It's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids,' says Gates. 'Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today.'"
He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
So... (Score:2, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if everybody get a chance to get vaccines, then the only people who are at risk because of not wanting vaccines are the people who have chosen it for themselves, correct? And if there aren't enough vaccines to go around, then just skip over the people who don't want them and give them to the people who do.
People still have the right to smoke and drink, even though those things are dangerous to their personal health and sometimes to the health of those around them. If you're going to enforce your positive world view on one subject on the people are around you, then you need to be consistent and protect them from all of the misinformed decisions they might make in their life.
The numbers, like Sales of Windows, don't add up. (Score:2, Interesting)
I am all for Mr. Gates philanthropy. However, the World Health Organization reports 164,000 deaths per year from measles (which is the leading cause of death among children), not the millions claimed by Mr. Gates. In addition, WHO reports that 83% of all children are vaccinated against the measles and that those who aren't are mainly poor countries without access.
Anti-vaccination is a rigged game for sociopaths (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been done and didn't convince them. It was depressing hearing a radio program where a vaccination expert and a person in charge of a anti-vaccination group put there points to some parents with young babies who then voted on it. The doctor talked about the outcomes of a trial involving two million children in the UK while the other person indulged in character assassination and piles of emotional bullshit. She was playing a manipulative game where truth did not remotely matter while the doctor had to be professional and stick to facts. An unemployed high school dropout with a hobby was putting doubt into everyone's heads about the qualifications of somebody that has been working on infectious diseases for forty years.
Of course lies and emotional bullshit won because parents with a newborn baby were being told they would be bad parents if they exposed their babies to the mercury that isn't even in the vaccine that the program was about. It was depressing and to an extent was a glimpse into how evil some of the people involved are. They should get a different hobby that manipulates people in a more harmless way instead of this dangerous hobby that is convincing parents to put their children in danger.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Hunger isn't because of overpopulation. There is hunger in some regions because of a lack of infrastructure to move the food around efficiently.
Look at eastern Africa's famines of the 1980s, you had net exporters of food in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe while only a couple thousand miles away millions starved to death in Ethiopia and Somalia. Those people didn't die because there weren't enough kilograms of food, they died because the surpluses couldn't be quickly and efficiently moved.
Likewise in Somalia in 1992-94, there were famines in the countryside because aid food was stockpiling in the port and the limited road net was being controlled by militias which made distribution impossible. The entry of the UN and US peacekeeping forces led to the control of the road net and proper distribution of the food.
North Korean famines wouldn't happen if the DPRK had more open borders with China and the Republic of Korea, as it stands now a famine in North Korea is hidden and denied until hundreds of thousands are dead and then the delivery of aid is delayed internally for political reasons like the rebagging of US Aid grain into DPRK labeled bags.