Business / Technology

Apologies to the Lancet: your editorial provides five sound suggestions which global health experts (and I expect the Foundation) will take seriously, but your analysis leading to those conclusions is so tangled and inconsequential that it is hard for an informed reader to fully buy in. Your journal would have been better served doing a real analysis of Foundation grant performance, or none at all, rather than a thin analysis which undermines otherwise important feedback.

What a waste of effort. "People spending money on stuff influences the world and if that does not line up with my belief system I want it changed".

I don't find the Gates Foundation's philanthropy "whimsical", just because there is a personal aspect to what the Foundation decides to give to. We all do the same thing. From the hundred or more charities that bombard our mailboxes a year, most of us are very selective in what we donate to. Yet no one is calling the average American donor "whimsical".

The Gates Foundation is transparent enough to take the Lancet's article seriously. And what's wrong with searching out high tech solutions, that may combine several aspects to address a serious problem?

The bottom line I'm reading from this article, is that too many people want to be in on determining what and where the Gates Foundation monies go. So I fall back on that old joke: A camel is just a horse built by a committee.