World
India
Melinda French Gates has sounded an alarm over the US withdrawal from key global health initiatives, warning of dire consequences for children in the world’s poorest regions. Responding to a question by a CNN interviewer on Monday, the philanthropist said, “What keeps me up are young children dying.”
Gates expressed deep concern over U.S. pullbacks from programs like GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which she said have played a crucial role in saving millions of young lives. “The US is pulling back on the vaccine alliance that was created well over 20 years ago,” she told CNN. “That and malaria bed nets are the two things … that have kept children alive that have reduced the childhood death around the world by more than half. So to see that we would do something so devastating to families and it’s so inexpensive, it just doesn’t feel like who we’ve been as a country.”
Her remarks came amid reports that a billion-dollar U.S. grant to GAVI is among the foreign aid reductions recently detailed by the State Department. According to global health data estimates cited by the publication, childhood vaccinations have prevented over 150 million deaths since 1974, accounting for 40% of the drop in infant mortality worldwide.
In a strong appeal, Gates also highlighted the critical role of insecticide-treated malaria bed nets, claiming that they have helped reduce all-cause child mortality by up to 20% in African countries, according to several clinical trials.
Gates further insisted that while philanthropy plays an important role in global health innovation, it cannot substitute the scale of government investment. “The philanthropic sector can try experiments you wouldn’t want to try with taxpayer dollars, right, because … some of the medicines don’t come to fruition. But once they do, then it takes government funding to scale them up. So nobody can fill that void.”
