The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is not as pure as it seems.

[HiPointDem]

52. yeah, right. that's why unicef and others pay *more* for vaccines, cause bill wants to help

everybody so much.

You see a picture of Gates personally putting a dose of polio vaccine into a child’s mouth, in one link, as though he had bought it with his billions. It turns out later that what he bought was the leverage to spend the money my own students raise each year for Unicef, and that he used his GAVI Alliance control to engineer a secret price gouging scheme, to overcharge Unicef and the other real charities who purchase the vaccines.

That’s a cold fact, not a “conspiracy theory”, and it’s a crime when drug companies collude to raise prices. The puzzle piece missing is, as you say, a motive for the Gates Foundation. His rationale is apparently that higher profits will incentivize big Pharma to invest in research, he explained in his Forbes interview.

http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/05/more-puzzling-about-the-gates-foundation/


The first question:

Does GAVI strike the hardest bargain with drug companies, getting the needed vaccines at the lowest cost? Put another way, is the organization too willing to accept what the drug companies want?

The Wall Street Journal today cites a number of organizations who think GAVI has not done enough to reduce prices, is too “cozy” with drug companies and want to see pharmaceutical industry representatives removed from the governing board. Nina Schwalbe, a GAVI official, responded that the alliance has done the best it could to get the industry to reduce vaccine prices and that they need to collaborate with the drug industry...

Some would argue that the GAVI Alliance is one of the best marketing machines ever devised by industry and partners, stimulating demand and shaping pricing mechanisms…. Challenging the industry publicly or privately seems off limits for discussion, adding to the ‘smoke and mirrors’ perceived relationship that GAVI has with pharma...

http://humanosphere.kplu.org/2011/06/is-the-gates-foundations-plan-for-global-vaccinations-too-friendly-to-the-drug-industry/


USA (AP) -- UNICEF is for the first time publicizing what drugmakers charge it for vaccines, as the world's biggest buyer of lifesaving immunizations aims to spark price competition in the face of rising costs.

On Friday, UNICEF posted on its website the actual prices that it has paid individual drugmakers for 16 vaccines purchased over the last decade. It's a move that a few Western pharmaceutical companies don't support. Novartis AG and Merck & Co., which only sells one of its many children's vaccines to UNICEF, both declined to have their prices published.

UNICEF said it will continue to disclose pricing of future vaccine deals, with the hope that the transparency will push drugmakers to cut prices and thus allow the organization to vaccinate more children and save more lives.

Its price list shows significant disparity, with Western drugmakers often charging UNICEF double what companies in India and Indonesia do. Just as striking is the steady rise in prices in the last decade, with the cost of vaccines against measles, polio and tetanus roughly doubling between 2001 and 2010. Prices of a few vaccines have remained flat or declined as additional competitors entered the market.

http://www.mb.com.ph/node/320365/unicef-di