Gates Foundation

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In their strenuous efforts to defend gates from any criticism, they're actually advancing misinformation into the public discourse. You know, your story about being held up on this science programme as promoting conspiracy theory. That's the third story like this i've heard in lie three weeks. It just speaks to the kind of problem you're talking about, where criticism of bill gates is conflated with a conspiracy around him and his foundation. And it could be because some of them may not want to take funding from the gates foundation during the pandemic when there's so much conspiracy at play. An editor or publisher might just find it easier not to deal with this issue.

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss how Bill Gates wields his wealth to shape public policy, the many conflicts of interest of Bill and his Foundation, and how legitimate criticism of power is being positioned as conspiracy.

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose recent work on the Gates Foundation has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Review of Journalism, and the British Medical Journal. Follow Tim on Twitter as @TimothyWSchwab.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Tim wrote about the Gates Foundation’s conflicts of interest, in particular during the pandemic. He also wrote about how Gates’ funding of media and health data produces accountability and transparency problems.
Paris had a viral thread about Gates’ intervention in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, after which an interview said it was a conspiracy theory.
After getting the rights to the Oxford vaccine, AstraZeneca ran into trouble in clinical trials.
The Associated Press found three factories in Bangladesh alone that could be producing vaccines if patent protections were waived.
The Mail and Guardian in South Africa published an article on Bill Gates’ complicity in vaccine apartheid and the author’s Twitter account was locked for tweeting about it.
In 2015, Thomas Piketty talked to the BBC about the problems with billionaire philanthropy.