Gates' influence on health policy questioned, too

Bill Gates has been called "the Nation's School Superintendent" with disapproval, because his money (and that of other billionaire philanthropists) is driving big parts of public-education policy, even though Gates and his counterparts actually know nothing about education. They fund those "simplistic solutions" that are often ineffective or even destructive.

But I assumed that Gates' similarly bounteous and high-profile investment in world health was a good thing. It's interesting to learn from this New York Times article that not everyone thinks so:

Gates Foundation's Influence Criticized
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times
February 16, 2008

The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function.

In a memorandum, the malaria chief, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., that the foundation’s money, while crucial, could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences.”

Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”

Also, he argued, the foundation’s determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization’s recommendations “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.”

Dr. Tadataka Yamada, executive director of global health at the Gates Foundation, disagreed with Dr. Kochi’s conclusions, saying the foundation did not second-guess or “hold captive” scientists or research partnerships that it backed. “We encourage a lot of external review,” he said.

The memo, which was obtained by The New York Times, was written late last year but circulated this week to the heads of several health agency departments, with a note asking whether they were having similar struggles with the Gates Foundation.

A spokeswoman for the director general said Dr. Chan saw the memo last year but did not respond to it. It is “the view of one department, not the W.H.O.’s view,” said the spokeswoman, Christine McNab. The agency has cordial relations with the foundation, and the agency’s policies are set by committees, which include others besides Gates-financed scientists, she said.

The Gates Foundation has poured about $1.2 billion into malaria research since 2000. In the late 1990s, as little as $84 million a year was spent — largely by the United States military and health institutes, along with European governments and foundations. Drug makers had largely abandoned the field. (China was developing a drug, artemisinin, that is now the cornerstone of treatment.)

[...]There have been hints in recent months that the World Health Organization feels threatened by the growing power of the Gates Foundation. Some scientists have said privately that it is “creating its own W.H.O.”

One oft-cited example is its $105 million grant to create the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Its mission is to judge, for example, which treatments work or to rank countries’ health systems.

These are core W.H.O. tasks, but the institute’s new director, Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, formerly a health organization official, said a new path was needed because the United Nations agency came under pressure from member countries. His said his institute would be independent of that.

And by the way, it was Michael Klonsky's Small Talk blog that alerted me to this article. That's ironic, because Mike is increasingly sharply critical of me because of my questions over the push to create new Small Schools by Design in SFUSD — a push that has funding from the Gates Foundation.