Gates Foundation Puts Up $10 Billion to Fight Infectious Disease

Bill Gates sat for an interview earlier this week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, explaining to the late night TV host how his day to day focus has shifted completely away from the software company he built into an industry leader on the way to becoming the world's wealthiest man.

These days, and for the past eight months, Gates has been focusing full time on the philanthropy he and his wife established. Describing the project focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a means to make meaningful positive impact, Gates told Stewart that their domestic focus is on education, while elsewhere around the world the Foundation looks to address the what he describes as the global injustices of health care and food availability.

With the benefit of hindsight as well as today's big announcement, it seems as though he was being so understated and coy about it. As Nature and other news media are reporting, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pledging an astonishing $10 billion for a decade-long push to bolster vaccination against infectious disease across the developing world. This extension of financial support represents the Foundation's most generous contribution to date toward the research, development, and delivery of immunization programs.

The gift was announced at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. An assessment of its potential impact performed by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that the lives of between 8 and 9 million children could be saved as a result of the work and provision of medical care that the donation will make possible.

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Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum via Wikimedia Commons