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Gates blasts funding for baldness over malaria vaccine

March 18 2013 at 08:00am

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BillL Gates criticised capitalism, saying it caused fundraising efforts to go to trivial issues that bothered rich people as opposed to global health epidemics that were devastating the poor.

The Microsoft founder was speaking at a conference on Friday about his latest philanthropic push to end malaria, saying it was slighted in terms of funding because the ones with the cheque books were typically men in wealthy countries.

“The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace,” he said.

“Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives.”

He said the way to fix the disparity was to address this “flaw in the pure capitalistic approach”,

a poke at the financial system that led to his success.

Gates, who is worth $67 billion (R616bn), has dedicated most of his time since handing over day-to-day Microsoft operations to the philanthropic foundation he runs with his wife Melinda.

He is not the first billionaire to bash the ladder he climbed up. Virgin magnate Richard Branson, financial gurus Warren Buffett and George Soros, and filmmaker George Lucas have all faulted capitalism’s inequality. – Daily Mail


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