I think this is an interesting data point in the story of an over-arching shifting of philosophies. That philosophical shift has been brought on by the historic

I think this is an interesting data point in the story of an over-arching shifting of philosophies. That philosophical shift has been brought on by the historically unmatched availability of data. The old way tasked experts with figuring out where to spend money and resources to do the most good; the best of those experts found their way to the top spots of the UN, WHO, the world bank, etc. These folks are the best in the world at what they do. The problem, for them, is that Bill Gates isn't interested in doing it the way it's always been done. He doesn't want a bunch of experts in a room deciding how resources are used. He's talked about this a lot over the years, and the people who handle the nitty gritty details of his organization have talked about it some too. Data comes first for the foundation. Certainly, that data is filtered through a particular, somewhat pro-capitalist, and competitive, lens. But, the data is driving the decisions...it has much less room for experts in the decision-making process. I honestly don't know enough about the person making these assertions, or the problems of improving world health; they may very well be right. But, I remember reading about the early days of the foundation, and thinking, "Hmm...this might actually do some amazing stuff." And, I think they really have. Solving malaria with a cheap, safe, vaccine, would be a miracle on the order of achieving world peace (more people have died from malaria, mostly young children, than in all the wars ever fought). Further, I question anyone who asserts that responding to Ebola would be a more valuable use of resources than saving the lives of as many as 1 million children per year who would have died of malaria. As someone else mentioned, it sounds like someone thinking like a human, and making the mistake of valuing catastrophic events higher in terms of their importance over the data-driven approach of attacking the biggest problems. It's like the difference between the old school hacker who micro-optimizes a program by inlining functions or converting the whole thing from an interpreted to compiled language, vs. someone who profiles the code and finds the bottlenecks and knocks those out by using more efficient algorithms with less time/effort and better results than the micro-optimization strategy. This may be that, despite my general dislike of Bill Gates, I simply think more like Gates. I guess a lot of us here do, and that may be why the general consensus in this thread is to dismiss the article and side with Gates. That may be an indicator that we should all do a bit more research and thinking on the subject. I may make myself a homework project of coming up with an equally compelling argument for why this article is right, and Bill Gates is still an asshole after all these years.