News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Polio Is on the Brink of Eradication by tga_d on Thursday November 23, 2023 @10:30PM (#38400413)
Saying the eradication of Polio "was primarily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" is a vast overstatement. Less than a third of the main organization's funding came from the Gates Foundation, and outside of funding, a lot more of the effort was from your run-of-the-mill local civil health organizations, community outreach programs, etc.. There's no solid evidence that billionaires made such programs successful, especially given that the polio eradication effort has notoriously been mired by repeated setbacks.

It's also a vast overstatement to claim "most top universities have billionaires to thank for their existence" or that "the widespread existence of public libraries is mostly due to" Carnegie libraries. Most top universities in the world are public institutions, and public libraries existed long before Carnegie (there was never a point in American history where most public libraries were Carnegie libraries, let alone in other countries).

There are no comments on this comment yet.